⚖️ China opens Nvidia antitrust probe over $6.9B Mellanox deal

Nvidia is the trending search today, so here is the paperwork. The record shows China's market regulator opened an anti-monopoly investigation into Nvidia over its Mellanox purchase, according to CNBC's report of Sept. 17, 2025. The documents read for this piece contain no regulator finding that Nvidia breached the law. Nor do they list any conditions attached to the deal.

The timeline

March 11, 2019: Nvidia announced a definitive agreement to buy Mellanox for $125 per share in cash, an enterprise value of about $6.9B, in its own newsroom statement. Engadget reported that the bid beat an Intel offer of $6 billion made months earlier. CNBC reported that analysts did not see any regulatory hurdles for Nvidia. Intel, it said, would have faced challenges.

April 16, 2020: Reuters reported that Nvidia said Chinese authorities had approved the deal, the last obstacle. US and EU antitrust authorities had already approved it, Reuters said. Reuters noted that other US deals had stalled in Beijing during the trade war, and that Qualcomm walked away from a $44 billion deal for NXP Semiconductors after failing to win Chinese approval. The Reuters piece mentions no conditions.

Nov. 7, 2022: Reuters reported that Nvidia confirmed it was offering a chip called the A800 in China that met new US export control rules. Nvidia had said the limits could affect about $400 million of China chip sales in one quarter, Reuters reported.

Aug. 11, 2025: the BBC reported that Nvidia and AMD had agreed to pay the US government 15% of Chinese revenues to secure export licences. For Nvidia that meant 15% of H20 chip sales in China. Nvidia told the BBC: "We follow rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets." Critics quoted by the BBC called the arrangement a precedent they disliked, and some investors compared it to an export tax.

Sept. 17, 2025: CNBC reported that China's State Administration for Market Regulation had opened the Mellanox investigation earlier that week. The same day, CNBC reported that the Financial Times said China's internet regulator had told ByteDance and Alibaba not to buy Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D. Jensen Huang responded to the second report, not the probe, and Nvidia's reaction to the investigation itself is not in the CNBC piece.

"we can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be."

Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, quoted by CNBC, Sept. 17, 2025

Jan. 14, 2026: the BBC reported that the Commerce Department cleared Nvidia's H200 chips for sale in China, with conditions on security and military use. The BBC said the President had spoken of a 25% fee. The Guardian reported on Jan. 17, 2026, citing a Financial Times report, that Chinese customs had blocked H200 shipments. Reuters could not verify the report, and Nvidia had not responded to Reuters' request for comment at the time.

How the pieces sit together

The percentages differ. The 15% arrangement covered H20 chips, per the BBC. The 25% figure came with the later H200 policy, per the BBC and the Guardian. Meanwhile Washington licenses the chips, and Beijing's regulator is examining a deal it approved in 2020. You can draw your own line between those facts. The documents read draw none.

What did the regulator decide? That is not in the record read. Nvidia's position on the probe is not stated in those documents either.