8 ms·
US eyes antitrust investigation against Nvidia as market value surpasses $3T
- exabrial 2y agoI honestly don't care a lot about nvidia, it's the Apples, Googles, Facebooks, Microsofts, Comcasts, that literally make my daily life a PITA.
- Rinzler89 2y agoKinda. Nvidia's monopoly affects more the other big-tech players running AI in their datacenters rather than average joe consumers. I don't like what Nvidia has done to gamers but they're not really a monopoly just because AMD and Intel were too busy tripping over their shoelaces and Jensen Huang built a well oiled machine that outcompeted everyone else.
- tsunamifury 2y agoEven so, isn't the overarching theory of monopoly changing now to not just be about the customers but national defense as well. As we've seeing with Boeing if we let a critical company kill of or buy up its rivals, once it achieves dominance it decays, leaving the host nation with nothing.
- Dalewyn 2y agoIf succeeding means failure, then nobody is going to bother succeeding. Nvidia is a monopoly in the sense there is no competition, but unlike monopolies that are illegal this one came about as a result of the rest of the market simply not bothering to play while they kept pressing on. Succeeding so hard by legitimately outcompeting every other fucking bastard in sight shouldn't mean getting slapped with antitrust.
- _nist 2y agoThere is succeeding, then there is your company being overvalued to insane levels because of some hype boom. It also doesn't mean that just because you outcompete, then you can artificially reduce supply and only support a select few OS's (ie. windows) while producing modest performance gains in your GPU's. It's a modern day Tesla in waiting more than likely.
- tsunamifury 2y agoThis is not an honest interpretation of how we practice this. We do not terminate the company that achieves monopoly, we don't even stop them from succeeding. We simply ensure that others can continue to compete as well. Occasionally when called for we have broken up companies that are in too many spaces at once -- but even then we tend to do that extraordinarily rarely. It's a bummer when the chosen line of argument is this straw man victimhood a la Atlas Shrugged.
- Dalewyn 2y ago>We simply ensure that others can continue to compete as well. And there's the million (trillion?) dollar question: What is Nvidia doing to stop others from competing? No, "their product is too good" (which they are) is not a valid argument. If you argue Nvidia is deliberately not producing as many GPUs to keep prices high, first you'll have to see if they're just not getting bottlenecked by TSMC and second you will also have to bring in AMD and possibly Intel along for price fixing which by definition isn't a monopoly.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> What is Nvidia doing to stop others from competing? Locking down CUDA for one.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoIs Nvidia doing anything to prevent ZLUDA or ROCm from succeeding?
- exabrial 2y agoI'm trying to understand how any of that affects me.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- neogodless 2y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593275 U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI (nytimes.com) 2024-06-06 148 comments
- iamtheworstdev 2y agoantitrust requires consumer harm. is there any here? nvidia has gotten here by not resting on their laurels as opposed to how others typically do (imho).
- MOARDONGZPLZ 2y agoIt depends. Not all actions require consumer harm, some can be brought with likely to cause harm. This can mean lots of things but here probably reduction of choices available to consumers, reduced innovation in the market, or any other number of things.
- _nist 2y agoConsumer harm = selling their graphics cards at outrageous prices by keeping supply low and reducing the OS support for them by making Linux drivers crap. Then again, it never "required" consumer harm as far as I've read.
- Dalewyn 2y agoThat is at best a weak argument because guess what: AMD is competition and also sell at prices outrageous enough that there is no downward pressure. If anything, I would take Nvidia, AMD, and maybe Intel to court for price fixing their GPUs.
- _nist 2y agoI'm not sure what world you live in, but Nvidia sells their cards at 1.5 - 2 times the price than AMD's on average and AMD has had strong Linux support for years.
- MR4D 2y agoDo they though? Another narrative is that AMD undercuts Nvidia prices because their product isn’t as good. Worse, Intel then undercuts AMD pricing for video cards because theirs aren’t even as good as AMD’s. When you get to antitrust, things like this are important. I may agree with you, but an Nvidia lawyer will take this tact and run with it.
- antonioevans 2y agoHow will this possible government action affect American AI development if a case is brought against Nvidia? Wouldn't a case kill AI development by years, if not decades?
- nequo 2y agoA successful case would presumably reduce Nvidia’s markup on GPUs. That by itself would make GPUs more affordable and more widely available to people working on AI. The problem is if development of those GPUs has such a high fixed cost that in a more competitive environment revenue does not pay for it. But that seems unlikely to me at a first glance. AMD, Apple, Google, and Facebook all have their own chips. They just don’t have CUDA to go with it, or don’t sell their chips to customers.
- hot_gril 2y agoIs Nvidia's advantage literally just CUDA?
- Phlarp 2y agoKind of, all the other advantages they have are a result of being in such a dominant position in the market, which they gained more or less through that superior toolkit (CUDA).
- MajimasEyepatch 2y agoOther than pricing and any anti-competitive deals or collusion that DOJ digs up, CUDA seems like the obvious place you would attack by forcing Nvidia to open it up. But I don't know if that's likely to be an angle the government would pursue.
- Phlarp 2y agoClaim eminent domain or BIS over CUDA and allow it to be used on all those other chips. You fix the anti-trust issues and super charge AI development just by open sourcing CUDA.
- 2y ago
- jjtheblunt 2y ago"reportedly" in the first sentence....but not in the article title. i wish there were an obvious way to filter articles down to just those based in established vetted facts.
- safety1st 2y ago[flagged]
- kube-system 2y agoI don't see what the problem is. As the article and its linked sources mention, this is according to Politico and NYT's inside sources who are not authorized to speak publicly. This sounds consistent with "US eyes antitrust investigation". And it's as much as you're going to get until "US formally announces antitrust investigation".
- jjtheblunt 2y ago> this is according to Politico and NYT's inside sources who are not authorized to speak publicly that's the problem : it's hearsay presented as fact in the title.
- kube-system 2y agoI disagree, I think multiple inside sources is plenty enough evidence to say that an organization is “eyeing” something. It's not a very substantial claim.
- jjtheblunt 2y agoI see what you mean. It made me just realize something interesting though and that’s what happens to these news sources the papers the news outlets when there’s no news on any given day or if there’s really no news for a given week, then what do they publish?
- 2y ago
- bpodgursky 2y agoA company raking in incredible profit is a pretty good sign they are not doing anything special to maintain a monopoly, they just made a really good product and everyone else sucks.
- mikrl 2y agoSo apparently the caveat is antitrust are ‘reportedly’ looking at NVIDIA. But from what I’ve seen they haven’t really done anything anti-competitive. They seem like the same company as they were years ago: selling devices, software for the devices and support for the software. Compare to the tech megacorps who have evolved via acquisition, data brokerage and enshittification and always seem to find new ways to pop up and make you roll your eyes.
- Barrin92 2y agoThat's not how economics works, the very sign of a monopoly is that companies have market power and can set prices, that's why companies want to have one. Under monopoly conditions profits say precisely nothing about the quality of a product.
- hot_gril 2y agoYeah, the profit doesn't mean anything on its own.
- bpodgursky 2y agoIt's not illegal to have a monopoly. It's illegal to manipulate the market to maintain a monopoly. Product dumping to kill competitors for example. Milking your customers to the max is the opposite of what you'd do to illegally maintain a monopoly.
- vlovich123 2y agoThis is a very weird take. In 1998, MSFT announced a 28% increase in revenue with EPS increasing by 35% and ~4B in revenue. MSFT was making incredible revenue and profits for that time and were 100% engaged in practices to maintain their monopoly and extend it to unrelated areas (e.g. internet browsers). For those that don't remember, here's examples of what MSFT did: 1. Kickbacks to computer OEMs to prevent the installation of alternative OSes. Basically buying market share & preventing competition. 2. Embrace, extend, extinguish to take over standards protocols in favor of Microsoft-developed ones. 3. Unnecessarily integrating IE into the OS, making it the default browser, and giving it access to OS APIs to work and perform well that other browsers couldn't do. 4. Leverage their OS to maintain a monopoly in the office suite space and use the office suite to maintain a monopoly in the OS space.
- no_wizard 2y agoWould (albeit, likely forced) interoperability of CUDA and the like sufficiently create a level market place for competition[0]? It doesn't immediately ruin Nvidia and its moat, but it paves the way for competition that isn't thwarted simply because the leader in the space has proprietary software that everyone uses as the de-facto standard. This would make it possible for AMD and other competitors to compete on hardware and how well they can integrate the software. It would also diversify providers and in all likelihood accelerate AI development as having the same software work across different hardware means there is more total compute available (one of the current bottlenecks as I understand it) [0]: Kind of like how anti-trust with Microsoft ended up accelerating the market space for alternatives to their products as they started maintaining official documentation for their file formats used across Office products, as part of their strategy to stave off further issues of anti-trust. Same reason they open sourced C# by all accounts.
- hot_gril 2y agoI would rather let Nvidia take the win for now since they innovated to make CUDA. This is totally not a played out space yet; it's a kludge in the first place that GPUs are used for ML.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593275
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- from-nibly 2y agoAnti trust is just about making sure the federal government is the most powerful entity within the United States. If it was about consumer benefit they would do something about the absolute monopoly that midea has on over the range microwaves. Not that that's anything I'd care about...