France’s competition regulator has signalled that its long-running inquiry into Nvidia is drawing to a close, edging the world’s most valuable chipmaker nearer to a formal reckoning over how it wields its grip on the market for artificial intelligence hardware.
The company has long been tipped to face antitrust charges in France, and any decision could set an early European marker for how AI chips are policed.
“We are nearing the end of the investigation,” Umberto Berkani, the general rapporteur of the Autórité de la concurrence, told reporters on Thursday, in comments reported by Reuters. He offered no firm date for a ruling.
The case dates to September 2023, when French investigators raided Nvidia’s local offices as part of a broader inquiry into competition in the cloud computing sector. That search later hardened into a dedicated antitrust file focused on the chipmaker itself.
In mid-2024 the authority published a market study on competition in generative AI, warning of the industry’s dependence on Nvidia’s CUDA software, the programming layer that ties developers to its graphics processors.
Reuters reported later that year that the regulator was preparing to charge the company, which would have made France the first authority anywhere to do so.
Two threads sit at the centre of the inquiry. One is that reliance on CUDA, which remains the only toolkit fully compatible with the GPUs now essential to training large AI models.
The other is Nvidia’s web of investments in AI cloud providers such as CoreWeave, which regulators worry could tilt an already concentrated market further in its favour. Nvidia accounts for well over 70% of AI accelerator sales by most estimates, a share some analysts expect to climb higher as each new generation of chips widens its lead.
That dominance has drawn scrutiny beyond France, with regulators in the United States, the European Union, and China all having examined aspects of its conduct. It has also fed wider unease about European AI sovereignty and the continent’s heavy reliance on American hardware.
The French case has moved slowly by design, reflecting the difficulty of applying decades-old competition law to a market that barely existed when the rules were written. A statement of objections, should one follow, is not a finding of wrongdoing. It is a formal accusation that the company can contest, and cases of this kind often take a year or more to resolve after that point.
Under French law, a company found to have abused a dominant position can be fined up to 10% of its global annual turnover, a figure that would run into billions of dollars given Nvidia’s scale. The authority can also impose behavioural remedies, or accept binding commitments that stop short of a penalty.
What comes next is procedural. If the case is judged solid, the authority’s investigation team would issue a formal statement of objections setting out its allegations, after which Nvidia would be given time to respond in writing and at an oral hearing.
A separate panel, the authority’s college, would then weigh the evidence and decide whether an infringement occurred and what sanction, if any, to apply. Berkani did not say whether charges were certain, only that the investigative phase was almost complete.
Nvidia has previously said it complies with competition rules and competes on the merits of its technology. The company did not immediately comment publicly on Thursday’s remarks.
For Europe, the stakes reach past a single fine. Policymakers across the bloc have grown increasingly anxious about the region’s dependence on a lone chip supplier, concerns that have fed into the EU’s wider tech sovereignty push. A French ruling against Nvidia, whichever way it lands, would offer one of the first concrete tests of whether antitrust tools can meaningfully shape the AI supply chain.
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