Nvidia, which has been making great strides in the past two years, may be on the verge of a major event. The delivery of the company's latest artificial intelligence chips may be delayed. In addition, the US government has launched an antitrust investigation into Nvidia.
Delayed delivery of artificial intelligence chips
According to The Information, two insiders who helped produce Nvidia's new AI chips and server hardware revealed that the release of Nvidia's new AI chips will be delayed for three months or even longer due to "design flaws".
The report points out that this defect may affect a series of "big customers" such as Meta, Google, Microsoft, etc., as they have all ordered chips worth billions of dollars.
In addition, a Microsoft employee and another informed source revealed that Nvidia issued a notice this week to Microsoft and another large cloud computing provider that the most advanced AI chip in its new Blackwell chip will be delayed. It is reported that Microsoft is one of Nvidia's largest customers.
In July of this year, Nvidia added a 4nm chip order to TSMC to meet customer demand, resulting in a 25% increase in GPU chip investment for the Blackwell platform. Industry insiders believe that with TSMC starting to produce Blackwell platform architecture graphics processors, it means that Nvidia's AI server equipped with the "strongest AI chip on the surface" is about to be delivered, opening a new chapter in the AI field.
The US Department of Justice may launch an antitrust investigation into Nvidia
In addition to delayed product delivery, the US Department of Justice may initiate an antitrust investigation into Nvidia, mainly involving a merger case and Nvidia's business practices. The two surveys are independent but related, both focusing overall on the possibility of Nvidia building a moat around its GPU.
According to reports, this investigation is mainly due to complaints from Nvidia's competitors that Nvidia may have abused its market dominance when selling artificial intelligence (AI) chips. According to reports, the US Department of Justice is investigating whether Nvidia forced cloud computing providers to purchase multiple Nvidia products. The investigation also involves whether Nvidia will increase the price of network equipment for customers who want to purchase AI chips from competitors such as AMD in the United States.
In addition, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and 10 groups have sent a letter to the antitrust director of the US Department of Justice, requesting an antitrust investigation into Nvidia's business practices.
Outside of commercial activities, Nvidia's acquisition has also drawn attention from the Department of Justice. According to Politico, a US political news website, lawyers from the US Department of Justice are investigating Nvidia's acquisition of Israeli artificial intelligence startup Run: AI on antitrust grounds. The two companies announced the deal at the end of April this year, but did not disclose the price, although TechCrunch reported a transaction amount of $700 million.
The Israeli startup has been embroiled in a tug of war between US regulatory agencies and tech giants over the risk of artificial intelligence being controlled by a few giants. Run: AI has a previous partnership with Nvidia, which supports GPU virtualization and essentially allows its customers to do more with fewer chips.
Nvidia currently holds 80% of the AI chip market share.
A spokesperson for Nvidia wrote in a statement to Reuters on the 1st, "Our competition is based on decades of investment and innovation, strict compliance with all laws, and making Nvidia products publicly available to all cloud services and local clusters of every enterprise, ensuring that customers can choose the best solution for them