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Nvidia Offices Raided by French Law Enforcement
- aorth 3y agoOriginal source, as cited in the article: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-offices-france-raided-part-190011776.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-offices-france-raided-...
- bestouff 3y agoTL;DR: French antitrust enforcers raided the offices of a business suspected of engaging in “anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector,” targeting a company that the Wall Street Journal identified as Nvidia Corp The move suggests Nvidia’s dominant role in supplying chips for artificial intelligence tasks is coming under closer scrutiny.
- jandrese 3y agoEh, this is more a case of the competitors failing than nVidia abusing their market position. Maybe if AMD and Intel put more effort into making their drivers not suck for AI they could sell millions of cards too.
- fmajid 3y agonVidia is playing favorites in allocating its GPUs. It goes beyond the graphics card market, they are trying to corner the market for Cloud AI: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-muscles-into-cloud-services-rankling-aws?rc=6k0bdw https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-muscles-into-... https://www.theinformation.com/articles/in-an-unusual-move-nvidia-wants-to-know-its-customers-customers?rc=6k0bdw https://www.theinformation.com/articles/in-an-unusual-move-n... https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-nvidia-aids-cloud-rivals-of-aws-google-and-microsoft?rc=6k0bdw https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-nvidia-aids-clou... I realize it's hard to sympathize with AWS as a victim, but any monopolist like nVidia leveraging its monopoly in one sector (AI chips) to gain a monopoly in another is the kind of antitrust violation that is precisely what competition authorities are made to investigate.
- treprinum 3y agoThere are queues for H100 and everybody wants to buy them. How should they solve the allocation problem? They can also pull out of the market and sell elsewhere comfortably without any crazy bureaucrats harassing them because some French company/branch lost a bid and overestimated its importance to nVidia.
- hef19898 3y agoThose monopolist allocation issues usually involve legal cpunsle, cannot be based on sales price or competition, cannot be used to corner markets and so on. In the end, everyone should get an equal haircut, and nobody shoupd be able to jump the line. Classic issue in anti-trust. Source: Had some intense months discussing exactly such kind of situation. Hence I know it is absolutely solveable, but there are always people who just cannot accept to follow rules and accept constraints, which usually leads to some penalties down the line.
- baby 3y agoWe’ll see about that I guess
- capableweb 3y ago> Eh, this is more a case of the competitors failing than nVidia abusing their market position. Supposedly, but usually stable governments don't do raid on publicly traded companies on a whim, so maybe there is more to the story we don't know about yet?
- tormeh 3y agoHow are office raids still a thing? Surely these are 100% for show nowadays...
- perlgeek 3y agoThere are still printed documents, and I guess they'll use an office raid as a way to gain access to employee's emails.
- avidiax 3y agoThis. It is a very useful way to get access to unlocked workstations and corporate phones, which allows any city police force to search or access information that a national or foreign court might never allow, or only after a drawn out legal process. A company I worked for had a few people at each site that had a kill switch that would lock all workstations and lock out all employees at that site. That would prevent the fishing expedition from succeeding. Similarly, another company I worked for had a company policy that you should physically give up your corporate laptop and phone to customs, but speak to company counsel before giving any sign in credentials. Some countries like to data mine business travelers if they have a beef with the traveller's employer. Edit: I should point out that every large company should have a rapid response security team. And even if there's no formal system or procedure for a police raid, it would only take a few minutes for that team to decide that they have an obligation to protect the company's data and network. They certainly wouldn't let non-employees sit at a terminal and do whatever they want for hours or days.
- boeingUH60 3y ago[flagged]
- hef19898 3y agoYes, how dare authorities to enforce the laws? By the way, people in Germany said the same thing when the VW emission scandal broke, and was prosecuted, in the US about US car makers. The argument was redicilous in both cases.
- yread 3y agoThere are plenty of EU giants: Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Bjarne Stroustrup, Niklaus Wirth, Anders Hejlsberg, Bram Moolenaar
- dagw 3y agoAnd almost all of them ended up either moving to the US and/or employed by a large US tech organisation. No one is claiming the people from the EU aren't super smart, talented and innovative, just that the EU does a terrible job at of fostering and nurturing that.
- permo-w 3y agoyou meaning fostering and nurturing that into more exploitative mega corporations? I can live with that
- dagw 3y agoI mean fostering and nurturing any reason at all for these people (and people like them) to stay in the EU and not work for US based "exploitative mega corporations". Why do so many EU citizens see working for (or trying to start) a US based "exploitative mega corporations" the best way to achieve their tech goals.
- eternal_braid 3y agoBram has unfortunately died.
- mikhailfranco 3y agoFrance is top industrial espionage offender https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espionage-economy-germany-russia-china-business https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio... Well, I guess espionage is a French word: https://www.etymonline.com/word/espionage https://www.etymonline.com/word/espionage
- hef19898 3y agoAnd the link to anti-trust i what exactly now?
- kamray23 3y agoThey are suggesting that anti-trust is an excuse to perform industrial espionage. France is, however, also the top anti-trust and pro-consumer enforcer in the EU, which in many sectors leads the world in consumer protection regulations. There is no reason to assume it was done for industrial espionage reasons, especially as NVIDIA France is explicitly already a French company producing these AI chips.
- hef19898 3y agoAh, all those poor, prosecuted tech giants and multi-nationals... I'll shed I tear for them when I have time, or not. Explicitly including all former, current and potentially future employers. All of which raked in at least 10s of millions of anti-trust and other non-compliance fines, in some cases reaching billions. Don't do the crime if you don't have the dime, I guess.
- ginko 3y agoThe idea that only tech giants and multi-nationals get access to high-end AI accelerators is the main problem IMO. Nvidia keeps private individuals and hobbyists from access to affordable GPUs that can be used for machine learning by intentionally gimping the available memory in their consumer cards.
- SandraBucky 3y agoAn old remark on Nvidia https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/17/3092829/linus-torvalds-fuck-you-nvidia https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/17/3092829/linus-torvalds-fu...
- shadowfox 3y agoNot altogether sure what this has to do with the article and/or the raid?
- CapsAdmin 3y agoIs anyone else bothered by how the article just repeats the last paragraph, starting from the title with slightly more detail for every paragraph? Is there a name or term for this writing style? All I know it's related to padding when you don't really have any information.
- eurticket 3y agoAll filler, no killer. (As in, no killer details or interesting news.)
- kybernetikos 3y agoIt's not just for padding. Something like it would be done in newspapers, where I think the idea was that you would choose how far to read based on how much detail you wanted.
- solardev 3y agoNot just how far to read, but when articles on syndicated, other publishers can trim off less important details from the bottom. Less of an issue these days with unlimited space compared to printed papers.
- capableweb 3y agoThis seems to be a extra verbose version of "Inverted Pyramid" which is a common writing style when you want to get across the main point as quickly as possible, and then towards the middle/bottom of the article, it's mostly just information/context around the main point. But this article is a bit too extreme in repetitiveness I think.
- treprinum 3y agoWhat is the French alternative to NVidia? Some Raspberry Pi 2-level of GPU? Wouldn't NVidia France be just marketing & sales operation anyway? Are they going to fine NVidia next for creating and dominating the AI market due to ineptitude of its competitors? Are they hoping to get more discounts that way?
- hef19898 3y agoSame reason Intel had to oay up, abuse of market position. The problem is not having a dominant market position, the problem is abusing it. In case of nVidia, there is enough to justify anbinvestigation, and search warrant, into potential abuse. Whether or not this is true will be decided in courts, maybe some 10 years from now. And no, nations do not work like companies...
- treprinum 3y agoHow is nVidia abusing its market position when there is literally no alternative on the market? Intel was objectively hindering AMD but nVidia couldn't care less about AMD or any other competitor. Could you please cite something concrete instead of general hand-wavy "we will find something" arguments?
- xxs 3y agolook no further: "nvidia partner program" For the more inpatient ones, a wikipedia quote The program was regarded as an anti-consumer practice due to the fact that partnering companies were required to remove their gaming branding from all non-Nvidia graphics cards,[11] hurting consumer choice. Reportedly in response to these restrictions, manufacturers began releasing new brands for the competing AMD Radeon products.
- treprinum 3y agoThat's gaming not AI though. Given the crazy demand for H100 I doubt nVidia would feel anything if they completely pulled out of France altogether.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- egorfine 3y agoI see they did finally learn a thing or two from ukrainian collegues.
- diamondfist25 3y agoThe French were just looking for a few RTX so they can play CS2