Beijing’s State Administration for Market Regulation said the breach related to Nvidia’s 2020 takeover of Israeli outfit Mellanox Technologies, but offered no details on the preliminary findings or whether punishment was on the way.
The deal was cleared at the time only after Nvidia agreed to keep chips flowing into China. Since 2022, however, Washington has stopped Nvidia and other American chip vendors flogging their most powerful AI silicon to Chinese buyers.
Nvidia insists it has done nothing wrong. A spokesNvidia said: “We will continue to cooperate with all relevant government agencies as they evaluate the impact of export controls on competition."
Beijing’s announcement was made hours before US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent told hacks in Madrid that negotiators had hammered out a framework TikTok deal after two days of talks. A Wednesday deadline loomed over whether the app could stay alive in the US.
Nvidia’s shares dipped 0.04 per cent on the news which is a minor wobble for an outfit seen as the poster child of the tech fight between the two biggest economies.
The Chinese probe was officially launched in December into Nvidia’s $7 billion (€6.53 billion) Mellanox buyout. That came only a week after the Biden administration ratcheted up export controls.
Antitrust lawyers said Nvidia was in a bind as it only cut off advanced chip supply to follow US export rules while facing accusations in Beijing that it broke its 2020 promise to treat Chinese customers fairly.
In July, President Trump gave Nvidia permission to resume flogging its H20 chip, popular for AI inference. It had been blocked in April, quickly landed in new trouble when Beijing halted sales again citing “cybersecurity concerns.” Nvidia denied its products contain remote trackers or “backdoors.”
Now Chinese firms and Nvidia are waiting to see if the Trump administration signs off on a newer, more powerful AI chip, though that approval may get dragged back into trade negotiations.
China cannot mass-produce anything close to Nvidia’s top chips, largely thanks to US restrictions on advanced kit, but homegrown replacements are slowly improving.
Feng Chucheng, Hutong Research founding partner, said: “Beijing likely was signalling that Nvidia is not a bargaining chip for the U.S.”