Teresa Ribera raised the alarm over how companies can “entrench corporate power” in AI markets, as her regulators pursue alleged risks posed by giants including Nvidia and Meta Platforms.
“We are looking at the entire AI stack,” Ribera told Berlin’s International Conference on Competition on Thursday, referring to the set of technologies and services that underpin AI systems. She said the focus is not just on the final applications “but also on underlying models that power them, the data the models are trained on and the cloud infrastructure and energy sources at their foundation.”
Officials have already been homing in on potential bottlenecks such as Nvidia’s dominance in the market for graphics processing units, adding to scrutiny from the French antitrust regulator. GPUs have become one of the most scarce resources in the tech world, with cloud computing providers competing with one another to get access to them.
Nvidia’s prized H100 processing units have helped them gain a market share of above 80%, according to estimates, ahead of rivals Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Should any future formal EU antitrust investigation be started, firms accused of violations would run the risk of demands to change their business practices, and hefty fines.
More recently in AI markets, commission watchdogs have been probing moves from Meta to shut out rival AI chatbots from accessing WhatsApp to provide their services. It warned earlier this year that Meta’s conduct “risks blocking competitors from entering or expanding in the rapidly growing market for AI assistants.”
Ribera said on Thursday that a recent proposal from Meta to start charging a fee rather than impose an outright ban is being carefully assessed by her team, which will soon come to a decision on whether it’s necessary to intervene further.