(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Corp. won unconditional European Union approval to buy Israeli startup 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 didn’t pose any 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 to us that other software options compatible with Nvidia’s hardware will remain available in the market,” Teresa Ribera, the EU’s new antitrust chief, said 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. It didn’t 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 essential to new systems used to train large language models and other AI systems. While companies like Amazon.com Inc. are working to loosen Nvidia’s grip on the market, for now the overwhelming demand for the chips means that they cost tens of thousands of dollars apiece and are in short supply.
The EU’s merger watchdog had taken on the investigation following a referral from the Italian competition authority under special powers that allow Brussels to investigate mergers — including tech deals — that don’t meet required revenue thresholds for EU reviews.
Those powers were reined in following a recent ruling from the EU’s Court of Justice in a case involving Illumina Inc.’s blocked $7 billion takeover of cancer-detection provider Grail Inc. Judges said the EU’s merger watchdog had illegally encouraged national regulators to ask it to probe deals that would normally fall below the sales thresholds for EU investigations. The court only allowed the system to be used only when national watchdogs asking for an EU-level review of a deal already had jurisdiction to conduct their own probe.
