Nvidia will face no objections to its plan to acquire Israeli AI orchestration software vendor Run:ai Labs in Europe, after the European Commission gave the deal its approval Friday.
The Commission’s executive vice president with responsibility for competition, Teresa Ribera, said, “Since Nvidia is a leading producer of key hardware for AI applications used in the EU and beyond, it was important to carefully check whether its acquisition of start-up software company Run:ai may have negatively impacted competition in critical markets which are key for future competitiveness. But our market investigation confirmed to us that other software options compatible with Nvidia’s hardware will remain available in the market.”
The acquisition, reportedly valuing Run:ai at $700 million, was announced in April.
Six months later, the Commission accepted a request to investigate the deal from Italy’s competition watchdog, which suspected that the transaction may pose concrete risks for competition. The Commission began its investigation in mid-November.
It found that, while Nvidia likely holds a dominant position in the global market for discrete GPUs used in data centers, it has no incentive to limit the compatibility of its GPUs with orchestration software produced by rivals of Run:ai. Further, it found that Run:ai’s market share is, in any case, too small to be significant today, and customers seeking such software have sufficient alternatives.
But Nvidia may not be out of the woods yet. Competition authorities in other markets are closely examining the company’s acquisition strategy, and earlier this month China’s State Administration for Market Regulation regulators called in a five-year-old Nvidia acquisition — coincidentally of another Israeli company — for renewed scrutiny.
Nvidia bought Mellanox Technologies in 2019, beating Intel to the deal and agreeing to certain conditions to get the deal past China’s regulators. SAMR’s Dec. 9 statement announcing its investigation implied that a subsequent breach of those additional restrictive conditions could be what triggered its renewed interest.
Source:: Network World