The Federal Trade Commission will open an antitrust investigation in OpenAI and Microsoft, while the Department of Justice plans to investigate Nvidia, all on the grounds of looking into the companies’ pull on the artificial intelligence industry. The probes will concentrate not on mergers and acquisitions, but rather on the organizations’ conduct.
Microsoft has invested around $13 billion into OpenAI since 2019 and uses its AI model for its Copilot chatbot, as well as offers open-source models on its Azure cloud. In developing its own AI model, Llama, Meta has said it’s spent billions on Nvidia’s graphics processing units. Overall, the AI market is expected to surpass $1 trillion in revenue over the next 10 years.
The FTC previously began looking into major AI industry players such as Amazon, Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI. Chair Lina Khan explained it as a “market inquiry into the investments and partnerships being formed between AI developers and major cloud service providers.”
