Nvidia offices raided by French competition authority

For people not knowing French, the Nvidia offices were not raided by heavily armed forces, with guns or whatever shooting.

"Perquisition" is just some cops/people coming and getting into your stuff or taking it for analysis. It's like a search in Nvidia's stuff/software/internal communications. It required a warrant given by a judge.

Were they looking for the latest Linux drivers?
- They're gonna need bigger guns then.
- Still didn't found that piece of software
You just described a raid...
- Some people may see it in some other way.
- Maybe I'm too American raised in too much cop movies but a raid always comes off like body armor, armor piercing rounds of ammo, and flash bangs.
  
  So I kinda need it explained like this.
- Raids in america involve guns swat teams and often phantom warrants.
This is a problem with the US news in general because it uses the words "raid" and "execute search warrant on" as synonyms, when the former conjures up images of guys in body-armor with carbines and the latter a couple of cops and a bunch of specialized investigators. Like, various layers of US government have "raided" many of Trump's properties, and obviously it was the latter and not the former, it's not like Trump is gonna get the Breonna Taylor service.
- Also, just to be absolutely clear, no neighbours were shot, or anything of the sort.
- People are more likely to click on exciting headlines that play up drama, its like clickbait 101. "Nvidia office was searched" may be a more accurate realistic description but not super exciting. When I see 'raid' I think of SWAT teams busting up drug cartel homebases.
But that's exactly what I assumed happened when reading the headline. Almost no native English speaker would assume it meant there was a shootout, or violence, or whatever. What you described is a typical "raid" executed against a company.
- I think for a lot of people the word raid has connotation with an armed police raid.
- "Raided" is one of those bombastic clickbait headline words, like "slammed" or whatever. Unless it was actually a SWAT team busting down the door, what they should be saying is "executed a search warrant."

Nvidia is pretty cut throat so the chances of them doing something wrong are high, but i'm not sure about the chances of finding evidence. they must have effective policies to defeat investigations, most big companies have them.

Never underestimate the power of dumb procedures or the power of a government body who is certain they have a case.

Also remember, if it's not the act, it's usually the cover-up that gets ppl and companies on the hook.

Either way, this will be interesting.
Let me dream. As someone who gets physically sick at the proprietary bullshit they shove down everyone's throat, customer or not, I would love to see them get any level of reprocussion however unlikely.

linus-torvalds-nvidia.gif

That was an IMAX experience
- This one weird trick to have all your gifs play exactly at the users current brain resolution.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Nvidia’s France offices were raided by the country’s competition authority this week, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

While the French agency doesn’t mention Nvidia by name, it confirms it carried out a raid over concerns about anti-competitive practices in the graphics cards industry.

Sources tell the WSJ that French authorities specifically targeted Nvidia, which has seen demand for its chips skyrocket in recent months.

According to the WSJ, these types of raids occur early in the morning and have authorities “search a company’s premises, seize physical and digital materials and interview employees who arrive for work.” The French authority says it conducted the raid as part of its increased scrutiny on cloud technology, a topic the agency published a market study on in June.

A machine-translated version of the French agency’s press release says that dawn raids “do not pre-suppose the existence of a breach of the law,” which is something “only a full investigation” can establish.

However, a raid could suggest that Nvidia’s reign in the chipmaking market isn’t going unnoticed by global governments.

The original article contains 257 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 31%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is weird. I’m all for anti-monopoly policies and court action, but this doesn’t make sense. Did Nvidia buy out smaller graphic companies? I may be ignorant but the only ones I know is AMD and ATI who merged, and now intel is making their own. I guess I don’t see how Nvidia is a monopoly

E: I made this comment and the rest in the chain after a night of drinking high octane beers for my birthday. I’m an idiot

There's more to anticompetitive behaviour than just buying out small companies...

Nvidia has huge market share and uses their power as a weapon, in ways that are anticompetitive.

For example, in the past, they ~~bribed~~ financially encouraged devs to implement over-the-top tessellation because they knew it hurt AMD cards more than their own. They even went as far as encouraging hidden, highly tesselated textures in games to do this. Such as full oceans under the ground, or highly tesselated hair being rendered on bald people, then turning the opacity down to make it invisible. All while still crushing performance.

More recently, Nvidia had the GeForce Partner Programme. Basically, Nvidia was trying to strong-arm partners into essentially giving ownership of their branding to Nvidia, and banning them from using it with AMD products. Also banning branding AMD stuff as for gaming.

E.g. under this scheme, Asus might only be allowed to use their "ROG" branding on Nvidia products, and they wouldn't be allowed to have "Gaming" on their AMD products.

Failure to join the GPP meant losing first access to GPUs, having less time to prepare for new launches, and worse pricing on GPUs bought from Nvidia.

(Fortunately, though 2 OEMs joined GPP, public outcry killed it)

Or how about Nvidia telling Hardware Unboxed and other reviewers that if they didn't give Nvidia positive reviews, they'd fuck the channel over?

Nvidia has done a lot of anticompetitive stuff.
- The irony of getting schooled on anticompetitive behavior by TheGrandNagus himself.
- Thanks after reading this sober it makes sense.
According to this article, NVidia has a 80% market share over Discrete GPUs. https://wccftech.com/nvidia-retained-80-discrete-gpu-market-share-amd-20-in-q2-2022-despite-gaming-revenue-losses/

That certainly count as monopoly (wonder how igpu goes, but I’ll guess it’s AMD’s who’s first).

Plus they tried to buy ARM recently.

And in France, it’s not monopoly that’s illegal, but company in such situation have more legal restriction due to their potential bad influence on the market compared to smaller companies.
- (wonder how igpu goes, but I’ll guess it’s AMD’s who’s first).
  
  Intel, more likely.
- I get that but how’s that a monopoly? They own the market share cause of the product and performance of said product. They aren’t buying companies to boost their share, they failed the arm deal, and from what I’ve read aren’t keeping companies tied to their product. Chatgpt, Microsoft and others can use other hardware. When we look at other monopoly cases it’s due to a forced take over if the market like Microsoft or the current Amazon case. I’m not defending Nvidia outright, but I’m not seeing how a company who produces a better product is at fault of a monopoly.
  
  iOS has almost 60% market share, are they a monopoly cause people choose them as well?
EU competition law is about not having a single company dominate the market.
i mean kinda ? but that was like 20 years ago

also this is not about games but compute and the probably the tried arm buyout
- So where’s the monopoly? They make a better product and the arm deal isn’t sealed