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China finds Nvidia violated anti-monopoly law

<i>Justin Sullivan/Getty Images via CNN Newsource</i><br/>A building at Nvidia headquarters

By CNN Newsource

Published September 15, 2025 5:17 am

By Nectar Gan, CNN

Hong Kong (CNN) — China will carry out a further investigation into Nvidia after a preliminary probe found that the US chip giant had violated China’s anti-monopoly law, the Chinese market regulator said Monday.

Nvidia makes processors that power artificial intelligence, which both China and the United States believe is crucial for national security.

The decision to continue inquiries after the original investigation, launched in December, comes as the two countries hold their fourth round of trade talks in Madrid.

Nvidia was found to have violated the terms of the regulator’s conditional approval of its acquisition of Israeli chip designer Mellanox Technologies, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation said in a statement, without providing further details. China approved the acquisition in 2020.

Nvidia (NVDA) stock was down 2.5% in premarket trading after the announcement.

Earlier this year, Nvidia, along with AMD, agreed to pay the US government 15% of their revenues from semiconductor sales to China in exchange for licenses to export their technology there. The deal could help the Trump administration maintain America’s AI dominance while securing a critical trade agreement with China. It could also give the White House billions of dollars to spend as it wishes.

The White House in April blocked the export of certain AI chips to China, including Nvidia’s H20 chips and AMD’s MI308 chips. The unprecedented deal with the Trump administration allows the companies to obtain export licenses to restart sales of those chips in China, a US official told CNN.

Nvidia released the H20 chip last year as a way to maintain access to the Chinese market — which made up 13% of the company’s sales in 2024 — in the face of US export controls imposed by the Biden administration.

But the chips are widely believed to have contributed to DeepSeek, an advanced Chinese AI model that shook Silicon Valley upon its release earlier this year, raising concerns that China was further ahead on AI than previously understood.

Olesya Dmitracova, Simone McCarthy, Clare Duffy, Phil Mattingly and Lisa Eadicicco contributed to this story, which is developing and will be updated.