NVIDIA, OpenAi & Microsoft Investigated for Antitrust Violations | What Is Antitrust Case | News9

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Big tech seems to have found itself under the lens of scrutiny one more time. The US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are set to open an antitrust investigation into OpenAI, Microsoft–separate alleged offences–and chip giant Nvidia. What really is antitrust violation with respect to Ai. NEWS9 takes a closer look.

WHAT IS NVIDIA, OPEN AI, MICROSOFT ANTI-TRUST ALL ABOUT

Big tech seems to have found itself under the lens of scrutiny one more time. The US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are set to open an antitrust investigation into OpenAI, Microsoft–separate alleged offences–and chip giant Nvidia. The two bodies have struck a deal to jointly investigate antitrust violations in the field of AI with the Justice Department examining Nvidia and the FTC investigating OpenAI and Microsoft.

This will mark the first investigation into NVIDIA, after it attained the huge market capitalization figure of $2.7 trillion stamping its dominance in the AI chip market. NVIdia controls between 70% and 95% of the global ai chip manufacturing market.

The agreement signals the intensifying of scrutiny by the Justice Department and the F.T.C. into A.I., a rapidly advancing technology that has the potential to upend jobs, information, intellectual property, and the way people lead their very lives. Both agencies have been at the forefront of the Biden administration’s efforts to rein in the power of the biggest tech companies. After a similar deal in 2019, the government had initiated investigations against Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta. It has since sued each of them on claims that they violated antimonopoly laws in the United Staes of America.

The FTC has also opened an inquiry into investments and partnerships involving generative AI companies and major cloud service providers to assess their impact on competition in the AI landscape. This includes Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI, as well as Google’s and Amazon’s investments into Anthropic. The probe would include information related to market share, competitors, potential for sales growth, or expansion into product or geographic markets.

For months, Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI have largely escaped the brunt of the Biden administration’s regulatory scrutiny. But that began to change as generative A.I., which can produce humanlike text, photos, videos and audio, burst onto the scene in late 2022 and created an industry frenzy.

Regulators have recently signaled that they want to get ahead of developments in A.I. In July, the F.T.C. opened an investigation into whether OpenAI had harmed consumers through its collection of data.

The pitch towards scrutiny into Ai is not restricted to US alone. In December 2023, The UK’s competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) invited comments from third parties to assess whether the partnerships between Microsoft and Mistral AI, and Microsoft’s arrangements with Inflection AI needed to be looked into. This was in addition to ongoing investigations into Amazon and Anthropic under UK’s merger laws and the impact of these collaborations could have on all around competition in the UK.

The European Commission had announced in January this year that it was looking into competition concerns in the generative AI market, including whether the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft might be reviewable under the EU’s merger regulation.

India, as we know, has also taken steps into investigating the competition concerns arising from AI. As recently as April this year, a commission set up by the government had invited proposals to understand the emerging concerns around competition in developing and deploying AI systems and its impact on innovation in key industrial and services sectors.

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