China turns the screws on Nvidia with antitrust probe (www.theregister.com)

China’s antitrust regulator (SAMR) has escalated a preliminary finding that Nvidia violated the country’s Anti‑Monopoly Law into a formal probe, accusing the GPU maker of breaching conditions tied to its $6.9B 2020 acquisition of Mellanox. The conditions were intended to prevent Nvidia from using Mellanox’s networking tech to squeeze rivals and to preserve interoperability with other vendors. A formal investigation could lead to heavy fines or operational remedies restricting how Nvidia sells hardware in China; Nvidia’s stock slipped about 2% in premarket trading after the announcement. For the AI/ML community this matters because Mellanox’s high‑speed interconnects (InfiniBand/Ethernet) are a core part of GPU cluster performance and scaling for training and inference. Any remedy that forces divestiture, interoperability mandates, or limits on bundled offerings could reshape data‑center networking choices in China, complicate procurement for Chinese hyperscalers, and accelerate moves to local suppliers. The probe amplifies mounting regulatory pressure already driven by U.S. export controls and Beijing’s security review of China-specific H20 accelerators, increasing uncertainty around GPU availability, product variants (reports of cut‑down B300 chips), and the competitive landscape for AI infrastructure in the world’s second‑largest market.