(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Corp. has received unconditional approval from the European Union to buy Israeli startup Run:ai, which develops software to deal with artificial intelligence.
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The European Commission said in a statement on Friday that the acquisition did not pose competitive threats in 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 research has confirmed to us that other software options compatible with Nvidia’s hardware will continue to be available on 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 working closely with Nvidia since 2020, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker said when it announced the purchase in April. It did not disclose the terms of the deal, but Israeli newspaper Calcalist estimated the value of the transaction at $700 million. Nvidia’s last major deal in Israel was the acquisition of Mellanox Technologies Ltd. worth $7 billion in 2020.
Nvidia’s dominance of the AI chip market has attracted a lot of attention both at home and globally. The company’s graphics processing units, which first became popular in video games, are becoming increasingly important for new systems used to train large language models and other AI systems. While companies like Amazon.com Inc. working to loosen Nvidia’s grip on the market, overwhelming demand for the chips currently means they cost tens of thousands of dollars each and are in short supply.
The EU’s merger watchdog had taken on the investigation after a referral from Italy’s competition authority, which has special powers that allow Brussels to investigate mergers – including technology deals – that do not meet the required revenue thresholds for EU controls.
These powers were curtailed following a recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the EU in a case concerning the blocked takeover by Illumina Inc. of $7 billion from cancer detection supplier Grail Inc. Judges said the EU merger watchdog had illegally encouraged national regulators to ask it to investigate deals that would normally fall below the sales thresholds for EU investigations. The court only allowed the system to be used if national watchdogs requesting a review of a deal at EU level already had jurisdiction to conduct their own investigations.
