Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during Computex 2024 in Taipei on June 4, 2024.
Ehua Cheng | AFP | Getty Images
Nvidia Nvidia shares fell about 2% on Wednesday, briefly recovering from a premarket slide after Bloomberg reported the company had received a subpoena from the Justice Department as part of an antitrust investigation. Nvidia denied on Wednesday that it had received a subpoena.
The Justice Department’s investigation has not reached the stage of a formal complaint, according to Bloomberg, and the agency is asking whether Nvidia is making it harder to switch to other suppliers of AI chips. Nvidia has more than 80% of the market for AI chips for data centers, according to industry estimates.
Nvidia’s meteoric rise in recent years has been directly tied to its dominance in data center AI chips, which was established years before rivals AMD and Intel began to take the category seriously. Nearly a decade ago, Nvidia developed a programming language for its chips, called CUDA, that is a key tool for engineers training advanced AI models like the one at the heart of ChatGPT.
Many of Nvidia's biggest customers are cloud companies as well as internet giants, including Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Tesla.
As Nvidia's AI chips have become a hot commodity, the company has rolled out new enterprise software subscriptions and marketed its networking products as important complements to getting the most out of its chips.
The latest versions of Nvidia chips can come pre-installed in server racks designed entirely by Nvidia, an example of Nvidia's efforts to move from being just a parts supplier to a complete systems provider.
“We win on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and our value to customers, who can choose which solution is best for them,” an Nvidia representative told CNBC.
Nvidia shares fell about 10% in regular trading Tuesday, wiping $279 billion off its market value.
