AI’s future in grave danger from Nvidia’s chokehold on chips, groups warn
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has joined progressive groups—including Demand Progress, Open Markets Institute, and the Tech Oversight Project—pressuring the US Department of Justice to investigate Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market due to alleged antitrust concerns, Reuters reported.
In a letter to the DOJ's chief antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, groups demanding more Big Tech oversight raised alarms that Nvidia's top rivals apparently "are struggling to gain traction" because "Nvidia’s near-absolute dominance of the market is difficult to counter" and "funders are wary of backing its rivals."
Nvidia is currently "the world’s most valuable public company," their letter said, worth more than $3 trillion after taking near-total control of the high-performance AI chip market. Particularly "astonishing," the letter said, was Nvidia's dominance in the market for GPU accelerator chips, which are at the heart of today's leading AI. Groups urged Kanter to probe Nvidia's business practices to ensure that rivals aren't permanently blocked from competing.
According to the advocacy groups that strongly oppose Big Tech monopolies, Nvidia "now holds an 80 percent overall global market share in GPU chips and a 98 percent share in the data center market." This "puts it in a position to crowd out competitors and set global pricing and the terms of trade," the letter warned.
