Nvidia got 2% down today?

Nvidia’s shares (Nvidia got) fell in premarket trading after Bloomberg reported that the company had gotten a subpoena from the Department of Justice (DOJ) as part of an ongoing antitrust investigation. The ensuing news sunk Nvidia’s stock almost 10% in regular trading, erasing $279 billion from the chip maker’s value as investors took an axe to their financial models based on Pollyanna’s total available markets and other fact-free investment cliches.

Meanwhile, Nvidia shares were down 2. According to Bloomberg, the DOJ’s investigation has not yet triggered a formal complaint. The agency is asking how Nvidia’s practices hinder customers from switching to other suppliers of AI chips. In the data center AI chips market, Nvidia is sitting pretty with more than 80 percent of the pie as calculated by industry watchers.

Nvidia has a head start on its rivals, which didn’t begin to focus on data centers until long after Nvidia started making the AI chips that power them. That last part might seem a tad OTT, but then it bears noting that not so long ago Nvidia gave us CUDA without which most engineers working on out-of-this-world AI models (as ChatGPT essentially is) could hardly function. Nvidia’s AI chips power services are run by top cloud providers like Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Amazon, and Tesla.

With demand for Nvidia’s AI chips taking off, the company has also expanded its offerings to include enterprise software subscriptions and networking products that complement its hardware. He says that the fully integrated server racks they built in-house indicate a move from being just another component to moving more into full systems.

In the wake of that investigation, an Nvidia spokesperson told CNBC: “Nvidia wins on merit and we remain focused on serving as our customers’ trusted partner. Customers can choose whether to use GPUs from us or other providers for their selected workloads.” CNBC did not receive a comment from the DOJ.