Nvidia Broke Antitrust Law, China Says, as Tensions with U.S. Mount (www.nytimes.com)

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said it has found that Nvidia violated Chinese antitrust law, continuing an investigation opened in December into the company’s 2020 acquisition of networking firm Mellanox. SAMR alleges Nvidia breached commitments made at the time of that deal to prevent anti‑competitive behavior and to ensure continued supplies to China; the regulator said the probe will continue. The announcement comes amid escalating U.S.–China technology tensions — Washington recently blacklisted 23 Chinese firms and China is simultaneously probing U.S. integrated‑circuit suppliers — and follows earlier Chinese scrutiny of an Nvidia chip made for the local market over alleged remote shutdown and tracking risks. Nvidia shares fell on the news. For the AI/ML community the ruling heightens geopolitical risk around access to GPUs and datacenter interconnects that power model training and inference. Nvidia’s accelerators are central to global AI compute capacity, and any enforcement remedies (fines, supply conditions, or forced structural changes) or tighter export controls could constrain hardware availability, raise prices, and accelerate vendor diversification or onshore manufacturing efforts. The decision also underscores how regulatory and national‑security reviews — not just pure market dynamics — are now a material factor shaping the global AI hardware supply chain and project timelines.