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The U.S. Justice Department is investigating Nvidia's acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli artificial intelligence startup, for possible antitrust violations, said an individual aware of the Justice Department's discussions with third parties.
The Justice Department has questioned market participants in regards to the competitive impact of the deal, which Nvidia announced in April. The price was not disclosed, but a report by TechCrunch valued it at $700 million.
The scope of the investigation remains to be unclear, the person said, however the Justice Department has inquired, amongst other things, whether the deal could eliminate emerging competition within the emerging sector and cement Nvidia's dominant position.
Nvidia said Thursday that the corporate “wins on merit” and “scrupulously complies with all laws.”
“We will proceed to support emerging innovators across all industries and markets and are blissful to offer regulators with any information they require,” it added.
Run:ai didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. The Justice Department declined to comment.
The investigation comes as U.S. regulators and watchdogs are increasingly focusing their attention on anti-competitive behavior within the AI space, particularly because it pertains to big tech giants like Nvidia.
Jonathan Kanter, head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, told the Financial Times in June that he was investigating “monopoly bottlenecks” in areas equivalent to the info used to coach large language models, in addition to access to key hardware equivalent to graphics processing chips. He added that the GPUs needed to coach LLMs had change into a “scarce resource.”
Nvidia dominates sales of probably the most advanced GPUs. Run:ai, which has already collaborated with the tech giant, has developed a platform that optimizes using GPUs.
As a part of the investigation, first reported by Politico, the Justice Department is looking for details about how Nvidia decides on the allocation of its chips, the person said.
Government lawyers are also asking about Nvidia's Cuda software platform, which enables chips originally designed for graphics to speed up AI applications and is taken into account by industry officials to be certainly one of Nvidia's most significant tools.
The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an antitrust regulator, reached an agreement in June that splits antitrust oversight of major AI players. The Justice Department will lead the investigation into Nvidia, while the FTC will oversee the evaluation of Microsoft and OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT.
