France’s Le Maire Says Nvidia’s AI Dominance Stifles Competition

Nvidia Corp.’s dominance in artificial intelligence is causing “growing inequalities” between countries and is stifling fair competition, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire warned.

92% of graphics processing units — AI accelerators — are owned by Nvidia. (REUTERS)

 Nvidia Corp.'s dominance in artificial intelligence is causing “growing inequalities” between countries and is stifling fair competition, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire warned.

“Having just one single country with all the technologies, all the private companies, all of the devices, all the skills, would be a failure for all of us,” Le Maire told reporters at the UK's AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, north of London. He said 92% of graphics processing units — AI accelerators — are owned by Nvidia. 

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The European Union is examining alleged anticompetitive abuses in chips used for AI, a market that's dominated by Nvidia Corp, Bloomberg reported in September. The US company's dominant role in supplying chips for artificial intelligence tasks has come under closer scrutiny from regulators. The company's graphics processor units, which first became popular in video games, are increasingly essential to new systems that are used to train large language models and other types of AI software.

“I think if you want to have fair competition, you need to have many private companies and not one single company having the possibility of selling all the devices,” Le Maire said. 

The EU is in the final stages of pushing through legislation to regulate AI, and is keen to encourage its own companies to reach the same kind of market dominance as that seen by Nvidia and OpenAI. 

France, the US, and China signed a joint statement on AI on Wednesday alongside 25 other nations at the UK summit. France will hold the next meeting in 2024.

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