Street Calls of the Week
Investing.com - China has decided to drop its antitrust investigation into Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) as Beijing and Washington step up negotiations over trade, TikTok, and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing people briefed on the matter.
The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has terminated the probe, which was launched in February and focused on the dominance of Google’s Android operating system and its impact on Chinese smartphone makers such as Oppo and Xiaomi (HK:1810), the report said.
The regulator had initially suggested that Google was suspected to have breached anti-monopoly laws, although it did not provide more detail on either the probe or what Google was alleged to have done to violate the law.
Google had not been formally told that the investigation had been dropped, the FT said. Shares of Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Google’s parent company, were higher by roughly 1.4% in premarket U.S. trading.
The report comes as Beijing is also concentrating its regulatory scrutiny on Nvidia, the world’s most valuable chipmaker, in what sources told the FT was an effort to sharpen China’s leverage in trade talks.
Earlier this week, the FT reported that China’s cyberspace regulator ordered major tech firms, including ByteDance and Alibaba (HK:9988) to halt purchases of Nvidia’s AI chips.
China has also accused Nvidia of violating its competition laws in recent days, following what the country’s market regulator described as a preliminary investigation into Nvidia’s business practices.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and China held three days of negotiations in Madrid this week. President Donald Trump is also expected to discuss a potential deal on the U.S. operations of short-form video app TikTok -- which is owned by ByteDance -- with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday.
(Ayushman Ojha contributed reporting.)