The French competition regulator has indicated that its long-running investigation into Nvidia is nearing its end, bringing the world's most valuable chipmaker closer to a formal showdown over how it wields its influence in the artificial intelligence hardware market.
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The company has long been expected to face charges of violating antitrust rules in France, and any ruling could set an early European benchmark for how artificial intelligence chips are regulated.
“We are nearing the end of the investigation,” Umberto Berkani, the general rapporteur for the Autorité de la concurrence, told reporters on Thursday, in comments reported by Reuters. He did not offer any specific date for the decision.
The case dates back to September 2023, when French investigators raided Nvidia's local offices as part of a broader investigation into competition in the cloud computing sector. That investigation later evolved into a dedicated antitrust case focused on the chipmaker itself.
In mid-2024, the authority published a market study on competition in genetic AI, warning about the industry’s reliance on CUDA , the programming layer that connects developers to its graphics processors. Reuters reported later that year that the regulator was preparing to charge the company, which would make France the first authority anywhere to do so.
Two issues are at the center of the investigation. One is Nvidia’s reliance on CUDA, which remains the only tool fully compatible with the graphics processors now needed to train large AI models. The other is Nvidia’s network of investments in AI cloud providers like CoreWeave, which regulators worry could further tilt an already concentrated market in its favor.
Nvidia accounts for over 70% of AI accelerator sales by most estimates, a share that some analysts expect to grow as each new generation of chips widens its lead.
That dominance has prompted scrutiny beyond France, with regulators in the United States, the European Union and China examining aspects of its behavior. It has also fueled broader concerns about European dominance in artificial intelligence and the continent's heavy reliance on American hardware.
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The French case has been moving slowly by design, reflecting the difficulty of applying decades-old competition laws to a market that barely existed when the rules were written. A statement of objections, if it follows, is not a finding of illegality. It is a formal charge that the company can contest, and cases of this kind often take a year or more to resolve after that point.
Under French law, a company found to have abused a dominant position can be fined up to 10% of its global annual turnover, a sum that would run into billions of dollars given Nvidia's size. The authority can also impose behavioral remedies or accept binding commitments that fall short of a penalty.
The next step is procedural. If the case is deemed strong, the authority's investigation team will issue a formal statement of objections setting out its allegations, after which Nvidia will have time to respond in writing and at an oral hearing.
A separate panel, the authority's collegium, will weigh the evidence and decide whether there was a violation and what sanction, if any, should be applied. Berkani did not say whether the charges were certain, only that the investigation phase was almost complete.
Nvidia has previously said it complies with competition rules and competes on the merits of its technology. The company did not immediately comment on Thursday's statements.
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For Europe, the stakes go beyond a single fine. Politicians across the bloc have become increasingly concerned about the region's reliance on a single chip supplier, concerns that have fueled the EU's broad regulatory efforts.
