NVIDIA’s offices in France have been raided by authorities, according to a report today from the Wall Street Journal. The raid comes in question of NVIDIA’s potential “anticompetitive practices,” according to the WSJ.
France’s competition authority reportedly “carried out a dawn raid at the premises of a company suspected of having implemented anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector,” the authority said in a press release. In the release, NVIDIA was not mentioned by name, but the WSJ’s report uncovered that it was the company in question.
No further details of the raid were released, and it’s unclear at this time if anything was seized from NVIDIA’s office. The French authorities, however, made it clear that just because a raid was executed, it doesn’t mean that NVIDIA is guilty of anything at this moment in time.
“Such dawn raids do not pre-suppose the existence of a breach of the law which could be imputed to the company involved in the alleged practices, which only a full investigation into the merits of the case could establish, if appropriate,” the French competition authority said in its statement.
NVIDIA is the global leader in graphics cards, and earlier this year, the company expanded its reach by finalizing a deal with Microsoft that allowed for Xbox games to be released on NVIDIA’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service. Cloud gaming was also at the center of Microsoft’s Activision-Blizzard deal, with Britain’s Competition and Markets authority also citing worries of monopolization and anti-competition measures in that deal, as well.
It’s unknown at this time what the fallout of the French authorities’ raid will be. This article will be updated as more details regarding the situation come to light.
