In latest trade warning to US, China says Nvidia violated anti-monopoly law

By Eduardo Baptista and Arsheeya Bajwa

BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Monday accused Nvidia of violating the country's anti-monopoly law, the latest escalation in its trade war with the United States that has claimed the chipmaker as collateral damage. 

The statement from China's market regulator was made after what it said was a preliminary probe into Nvidia's business practices, and comes as the two countries hold trade talks in Madrid, where chips are expected to be on the agenda. 

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the announcement from China's State Administration for Market Regulation "poor timing," a move analysts said gave China leverage in the trade talks.

The two countries have traded barbs over the past six months since U.S. President Donald Trump hit China with massive tariffs, before lowering them to 30%, and threatened to shut down popular social media app TikTok. China has responded with 10% tariffs and antitrust probes against the likes of Alphabet's Google, signaling more regulatory scrutiny on U.S. firms.

"It's a warning that if the U.S. export control paradigm operates in the same way as in the past several years there will be consequences, and China is willing to inflict damage on U.S. companies," said Zhengyuan Bo, partner at research company Plenum. He added that SAMR's preliminary ruling was likely a counter to the Trump administration's decision on Friday to place 23 Chinese companies on a U.S. trade blacklist.

China's announcement piles on more uncertainty for Nvidia's business in China, which last year accounted for 13% of its total sales.

It shows that CEO Jensen Huang's charm offensive in China is not enough. Huang visited the country three times this year to signal his commitment to the Chinese market, and has said that selling AI technology to that country is key to the United States' ambitions to be a leader in the business. 

Despite big demand from Chinese tech firms including Tencent and TikTok parent ByteDance for Nvidia's chips that are needed to build out infrastructure for soaring AI workloads, Reuters has reported that China has discouraged the firms from such purchases as it tries to wean itself off U.S. technology. Beijing last month also asked Nvidia to explain whether its H20 chip, made specifically for the Chinese market, posed backdoor security risks that could affect Chinese user data and privacy.

Even after the U.S. authorized export licenses allowing Nvidia to sell H20 chips in exchange for 15% of its sales in the country, the chipmaker has not sent any H20 chips to China because the U.S. has yet to come up with rules on how to get the payment. The uncertainty over the China business has pressured Nvidia stock, which fell 2% on Monday before paring losses.

Nvidia said in a statement that it was complying with the law and would "continue to cooperate with all relevant government agencies as they evaluate the impact of export controls on competition in the commercial markets." 

The company declined to comment further on where it stood with the U.S. government on paying the 15% share of its China revenue. The U.S. Department of Commerce and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Separately, Bessent said on Monday that the two countries have reached a framework to switch TikTok to U.S.-controlled ownership, the second time this year that they have come close to a deal. 

MELLANOX MAKES NVIDIA MORE COMPETITIVE

The brief statement by China's State Administration for Market Regulation on Monday did not elaborate on how Nvidia might have violated China's anti-monopoly laws, according to which companies can face fines of between 1% and 10% of their annual sales from the previous year. 

Five years ago, China had approved Nvidia's deal to buy Israel's Mellanox Technologies with the condition that Nvidia would continue to supply the Chinese market with high-tech GPU chips. But the company was forced to end sales of its most advanced chips due to export controls implemented by the administration of former President Joe Biden.

The SAMR on Monday added that it would continue its investigations.

Mellanox makes high-speed networking equipment for data centers and Nvidia bundles them with its chips to offer advanced cloud-computing products. 

"The real concern is the potential for China to impose new measures restricting Nvidia's ability to sell networking solutions to Chinese customers," said Ray Wang, lead semiconductor analyst at Futurum Group. "This business is worth billions of dollars annually and continues to grow alongside rising demand for networking in data centers."

Wang added that the Mellanox gear played a "very important role, second to CUDA", Nvidia's computing platform, in allowing the firm to provide the best networking technology in the world.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at consultancy Omdia, said Nvidia could be required to sell chips in China unaccompanied by Mellanox's technology.

Still, an unfavorable ruling for Nvidia on the antitrust probe was unlikely to affect Nvidia's bottom line as much as China's efforts to foster domestic substitutes to the U.S. chipmaker's most powerful AI chips, Plenum's Bo said.

"This should not be taken as a sign that China is trying to kick Nvidia out of the country," he said.

(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista, Arsheeya Bajwa, Brenda Goh, Liam Mo and Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh, Sharon Singleton and Matthew Lewis)