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Sen. Elizabeth Warren is publicly backing the Justice Department's apparent probe into Nvidia's alleged anticompetitive tactics after the agency ramped up its investigation into the tech giant earlier this week.
The lawmaker from Massachusetts, who built her political career on advocating for competitive markets in the financial sector, sent a letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter on Thursday voicing support for the apparent probe following reports that the DOJ sent legal requests to Nvidia and other companies. Nvidia denied on Wednesday that it was subpoenaed.
"Allowing a single company so much influence over AI research, development, and monetization poses dire economic risks," Warren wrote in the letter, which was exclusively obtained by Business Insider.
In a statement Friday, a Nvidia spokesperson said the company's success was based on "decades of investment and innovation."
"NVIDIA wins on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and value to customers, who can choose whatever solution is best for them," the spokesperson said. "We compete based on decades of investment and innovation, designing GPU, CPU, networking, and software for accelerated computing and AI, scrupulously adhering to all laws, and making NVIDIA openly available in every cloud and on-prem for every enterprise."
This week, Bloomberg News, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported the DOJ sent Nvidia a civil investigative demand as part of an antitrust investigation, which has been brewing since earlier this year.
In Thursday's letter, Warren urged US regulators to intervene in Nvidia's meteoric rise, warning that competition in the semiconductor market will "only grow bleaker" as the company approaches total ownership of the market.
"The insatiable hunger of gargantuan Big Tech companies for Nvidia chips, along with the company's opaque and preferential allocation of them, are starving startup companies of the infrastructure they need to do business and crowding academic AI researchers out of the field," she wrote.
The Santa Clara-based chipmaker has undergone unprecedented growth in recent years amid the AI boom, building dominance in the semiconductor market as Big Tech companies become increasingly reliant on Nvidia's chips.
Other would-be rival chipmakers are trying to get in the game and build their own GPUs but remain years behind Nvidia's chips, which have become vital in the booming demand for AI.
In her letter, Warren accused Nvidia of using anticompetitive tactics that have "choked off competition and chilled innovation," including locking its customers in with compatibility restraints by bundling products, software, and services.
Nvidia's stock price has suffered amid a broader market rout this week and reports about the investigation.
