The U.S. Justice Department is reportedly scrutinizing Nvidia Corp.’s acquisition of startup Run:ai, which develops software for managing graphics card clusters. 

Politico reported the probe on Thursday afternoon, citing people familiar with the matter. The development comes two months after sources told the New York Times that the Justice Department is investigating Nvidia’s leading position in the artificial intelligence chip market. The review of the Run:ai deal is said to be separate from that probe.

Nvidia acquired Run:ai earlier this year in a deal reportedly worth $700 million. The Tel Aviv-based startup, which is incorporated as Runai Labs Ltd., previously raised about $118 million from investors. It sells a software platform that allows companies to realize a better return on their GPU clusters.

In certain situations, an AI application may require less compute capacity than what the graphics card on which it’s deployed can provide. Run:ai’s platform allows companies to make use of unutilized compute capacity by installing multiple AI applications on the same GPU. The platform also helps avoid memory collisions, computing errors that emerge frequently in AI projects and can slow down processing if left unaddressed.

Run:ai’s software promises to speed up AI workloads in other ways as well. To train a large language model, developers split it into fragments and run each one on a different GPU. Those fragments must regularly exchange data with one another while they’re being trained. Run:ai configures LLM fragments in a manner that allows them to exchange data faster, which allows training sessions to complete sooner.

The performance improvements unlocked by the software enable companies to speed up AI projects without adding more GPUs to their server clusters. Alternatively, customers can complete AI projects at the same speed as before using fewer GPUs. It’s this latter use case that has reportedly caught the Justice Department’s attention.

Because Run:ai’s platform can lower the number of GPUs necessary for AI projects, it might lead some customers to order fewer chips from Nvidia. The Justice Department will reportedly investigate whether Nvidia bought the company to “bury a technology that could curb its main profit engine.”

Officials are also scrutinizing other aspects of the chipmaker’s business. According to this week’s report, the Justice Department is evaluating whether Nvidia makes access to its GPUs conditional on customers buying its other products or committing not to purchase hardware from rivals.

An Nvidia spokesperson told Politico that “Nvidia wins on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and value to customers. We compete based on decades of investment and innovation, scrupulously adhering to all laws, making Nvidia openly available in every cloud and on-prem for every enterprise, and ensuring that customers can choose whatever solution is best for them.”

Last month, sources told Reuters that France’s antitrust watchdog was gearing up to file antitrust charges against Nvidia. The regulatory action is said to focus on CUDA, a suite of software development tools that the company sells with its GPUs. Officials are reportedly also concerned about Nvidia’s investments in AI-focused cloud operators such as CoreWeave Inc., which uses the chipmaker’s GPUs to power its infrastructure.

Image: Nvidia