China says Nvidia violated antitrust regulations (techcrunch.com)

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has ruled that Nvidia violated Chinese antitrust regulations in connection with its $7 billion 2020 acquisition of networking supplier Mellanox. The agency hasn’t announced penalties but will continue probing; Nvidia says it will cooperate and complies with laws. The ruling arrives amid fraught U.S.–China semiconductor talks in Madrid and sits atop a patchwork of shifting U.S. export controls — from the Biden-era “AI Diffusion Rule” and subsequent Commerce reversals to licensing measures imposed and relaxed this year — all of which have left Nvidia’s access to the Chinese market and the broader supply chain in flux. For the AI/ML community, the decision is significant because Nvidia’s GPUs and Mellanox networking gear are core infrastructure for training large models and data-center scale AI workloads. Any regulatory action against Nvidia could further tighten real-world access to high-end accelerators in China, accelerate vendor diversification (and domestic Chinese alternatives), and raise scrutiny on M&A activity in the semiconductor stack. Practically, developers and organizations should expect continued uncertainty in hardware availability, licensing delays, and potential changes in cross-border revenue and sales practices that could affect project timelines, cloud procurement, and global model training strategies.