Taipei, Taiwan – China has launched an antitrust investigation into chip giant Nvidia in what appears to be Beijing's latest act of retaliation against Washington's sanctions on Chinese tech companies. Chinese state media said on Monday that the California-based chipmaker was being investigated by the State Administration for Market Regulation for potentially violating China's antimonopoly laws. Regulators will also review the company's 6.9bn acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli-American supplier specialising in computer networking products, state media reports said, without providing further details. Chinese regulators approved the deal in 2020 with several restrictive conditions, including a provision that Nvidia would not discriminate against Chinese suppliers. Nvidia, which designs advanced chips used to power artificial intelligence (AI), is one of the world's most valuable companies, with a market capitalisation of more than 3.4 trillion.

NVIDIA, graphics chip maker and recent backbone of the AI industry, is under investigation by Chinese regulators over potential antitrust violations, The New York Times reports. The concerns center on the acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, a computer networking company NVIDIA bought in 2020. As part of the conditions of that acquisition, Chinese regulators required NVIDIA to "provide information about new [Mellanox] products to rivals within 90 days of making them available to NVIDIA," Bloomberg writes. China's State Administration for Market Regulation is kicking off its investigation because it believes that those terms were violated. This wouldn't be the first time NVIDIA has been investigated for monopolistic behavior – The US Department of Justice reportedly launched its own antitrust investigation into NVIDIA in September 2024 – but it has a different flavor in the context of the escalating trade war between the US and China.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Tech giant Baidu on Wednesday received approval by Chinese authorities to launch its artificial intelligence Ernie Bot to the general public starting Aug. 31, a spokesperson told Reuters. Baidu became the first company to receive such approval after regulatory setbacks and is also set to launch a suite of new AI-native apps. The company has been embedding Ernie, which resembles OpenAI's ChatGPT, into its search engine and other products, allowing many of them to gain market share while waiting for Chinese regulators' approval.

China's history of censoring the internet and using propaganda to give its citizens a false sense of reality is well documented. And now, Chinese regulators have announced new rules that will allow them to further dictate what citizens perceive as reality. From January 1, 2020, publishing and distributing what the regulators deem to be "fake news" created with artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, or virtual reality (VR) will be banned. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) added that content produced with AI, deep learning, or VR will need to be clearly labeled when these new rules come into effect. Failure to label such content under the new rules could be a criminal offense.

China's Nasdaq-listed internet search engine giant Baidu Inc. said Friday it has formed a team in Silicon Valley dedicated to its self-driving car efforts. The announcement comes as Chinese officials rush to set up a road map for incorporating highway-ready, self-driving cars within three to five years. Baidu's Silicon Valley team will grow to more than 100 researchers and engineers, focused on research, development and testing, by the end of 2016, the company said in a statement Friday. The Beijing-headquartered firm is looking to work on areas "integral to self-driving car development, including planning, perception, control and systems." The team in Silicon Valley will be part of the company's newly created Autonomous Driving Unit.