The US Department of Justice is investigating Nvidia’s acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli artificial intelligence start-up, for potential antitrust violations, said a person familiar with discussions the government agency has had with third parties. The DoJ has asked market participants about the competitive impact of the transaction, which Nvidia announced in April. The price was not disclosed but a report from TechCrunch estimated it at $700mn.
Jonathan Kanter, head of the DoJ’s antitrust division, told the Financial Times in June that he was examining “monopoly choke points” in areas including the data used to train large language models as well as access to essential hardware such as graphics processing unit chips. He added that the GPUs needed to train LLMs had become a “scarce resource”. Nvidia dominates sales of the most advanced GPUs.