China says Nvidia violated antitrust laws (www.businessinsider.com)

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said a preliminary probe found that Nvidia violated Chinese antitrust laws and announced a further investigation, including scrutiny of commitments Nvidia made when it acquired Israeli chip designer Mellanox in 2020. The statement gave no operational details or penalties yet. The move follows broader US-China semiconductor tensions and comes alongside US export controls that have already restricted Nvidia from selling certain high-end H20 GPU products to China. For the AI/ML community the case is notable because Nvidia’s GPUs and Mellanox’s high‑speed interconnects (InfiniBand) are foundational to large-scale model training and inference infrastructure. A formal antitrust action or remedies could affect Nvidia’s ability to sell or bundle products in China, complicate cloud providers’ access to compute, and set regulatory precedent for foreign chipmakers and future M&A in the sector. Developers, cloud operators, and hardware vendors should watch for outcomes — potential fines, behavioral remedies or divestiture demands — that could reshape supply chains, pricing, and deployment of AI compute in one of the world’s largest markets.