France’s competition authority raided Nvidia’s offices Wednesday morning.

Nvidia Jensen Huang
– Sebastian Moss

First reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Autorité de la concurrence only said that the investigation was focused on a company "suspected of having implemented anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector."

“Raids do not presuppose the existence of a breach of the law,” the competition authority said in a statement on its website, “which only a full investigation into the merits of the case could establish, if appropriate.”

The raid, authorized by a liberty and custody judge, comes as the competition authority is in the midst of a broader inquiry into the cloud computing sector to see if cloud companies could use their access to computing power to exclude smaller competitors.

Earlier this year, The Information reported that Nvidia gave preferential access to its high-end GPUs to smaller cloud companies like CoreWeave and Lambda Labs. It invested in the former company and was rumored to be considering investing in the latter.

It is not known if Nvidia's supply deals or investments are part of the investigation.

The company's A100 and H100 GPUs have been supply-constrained since the current generative AI wave caused demand to spike.