Nvidia faces US scrutiny over Hugging Face deal and sales practices

The deal is one part of a broader review

Officials have also examined Nvidia’s acquisitions of SchedMD and Run:ai, as well as its licensing agreement with Groq. They are looking at whether Nvidia offered customers more AI chips on the condition that they also bought its networking equipment and Groq processors.

That question matters because it goes beyond the terms of any single deal. If access to AI chips is tied to buying other products, the concern is how much choice customers have when sourcing the infrastructure they need.

Europe is watching CUDA and cloud

Nvidia is also under scrutiny in Europe. France’s antitrust authority is investigating alleged anti-competitive practices and has raised concerns about the industry’s dependence on Nvidia’s CUDA programming software and the company’s stakes in cloud providers such as CoreWeave.

The French regulator has identified several possible risks:

The US review spans acquisitions, licensing and sales, while the French inquiry points to software dependence and cloud ownership. I think the important unanswered question is whether regulators can show that these practices limit customers’ choices in ways that change competition, rather than simply reflect Nvidia’s position in a market built around its products. That distinction will shape how much of the company’s business comes under pressure.