(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Corp. won the European Union's unconditional approval to buy Israeli start-up Run:ai, which develops software for handling artificial intelligence computing resources.
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The European Commission said in a statement on Friday that the takeover posed no competition threats across the 27-member bloc despite Nvidia's position as “a leading producer of key hardware for AI applications used in the EU and beyond.”
“Our market investigation confirmed for us that other software options compatible with Nvidia hardware will continue to be available in the market,” said Teresa Ribera, the EU's new antitrust chief, in the statement.
Run:ai – founded in 2018 by Omri Geller and Ronen Dar – has been a close collaborator with Nvidia since 2020, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker said when it announced the purchase in April. He did not disclose the terms of the deal, but Israeli newspaper Calcalist pegged the value of the transaction at $700 million. Nvidia's last major deal in Israel was the $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies Ltd. in 2020.
Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market has drawn scrutiny at home and globally. The company's graphics processor units, which first became popular in video games, are increasingly critical to new systems used to train large language models and other AI systems. While companies like Amazon.com Inc. is working to loosen Nvidia's grip on the market, for now overwhelming demand for the chips means they cost tens of thousands of dollars each and are rare.
The EU's merger watchdog had undertaken the investigation following a referral by Italy's competition authority under special powers which allow Brussels to investigate mergers – including technology deals – that do not meet the required revenue thresholds on for EU reviews.
Those powers were bolstered following a recent ruling by the EU Court of Justice in a case involving Illumina Inc.'s $7 billion blocked takeover. from cancer detection provider Grail Inc. Judges said the EU's unification watchdog had illegally encouraged national regulators to ask him. to examine deals that would normally fall below the sales thresholds for EU investigations. The court only allowed the system to be used when national watchdogs requesting an EU-level review of an agreement already had jurisdiction to conduct their own audit.