Nvidia is under scrutiny by French competition authority Autorité de la concurrence and could face charges for alleged anti-competitive practices, Reuters suggests.

Reuters reports that Autorité plans to file charges against the graphics card giant, citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The exact details of the charges have not yet been made public, but presumably "anti-competitive practices" are suspected.

Autorité has already tangled once with Nvidia, conducting an impromptu raid on Nvidia's offices last September; while not directly naming Nvidia, Autorité's press release states that the raid was "an investigation into anti-competitive practices in the graphics card sector . on the premises of companies suspected of having engaged in anti-competitive practices in the graphics card sector."

A new Autorité report released last Friday outlines the causes of the authorities' concerns in another area, generative artificial intelligence. In it, Nvidia's name is mentioned in several places.

Nvidia is listed in the report as one of a handful of "major digital companies" that include Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Nvidia. Microsoft and Google-owned Alphabet are mentioned separately as the largest players. However, they are the only "IT component suppliers" specifically mentioned in the report.

The report further outlines various competitive risks in the sector. The only company named by NVIDIA is "the risk of abuse by chip providers."

The following is the full text of that section:

"Autolyte found many potential risks, including price manipulation, production restrictions, unfair contract terms, and discriminatory behavior. Concerns were also expressed about the industry's reliance on Nvidia's CUDA chip programming software (the only software 100% compatible with GPUs, which has become essential for accelerated computing). AI-focused, such as CoreWeave Recent announcements regarding Nvidia's investment in cloud service providers have also raised concerns.

"The graphics card sector, which was the subject of an unannounced inspection in September 2023, is being closely scrutinized by Autorité's research services."

Nvidia appears to be of particular concern to Autorité. After all, Nvidia is an important market leader in AI and graphics cards. Its dominance is broadly evident in the latest Steam Hardware Survey, where it holds 76% of the market.

That lead can also be seen in the AI business. NVIDIA is estimated to control 70-95% of the AI hardware market. At the lowest estimate, NVIDIA is in the lead.

Nevertheless, Nvidia faces competition in the AI hardware and game graphics businesses. Intel and AMD compete in both markets, as do certain accelerators used for AI operations, such as Google's TPU.

Similarly, the report notes that "alternatives to Nvidia's CUDA software are beginning to emerge. This presumably refers to AMD's ROCm or Intel's OneAPI. However, CUDA remains the number one draft today.