China has revived antitrust investigations into Google and Nvidia, while considering a new probe against Intel, as Beijing looks for leverage in talks with US President Donald Trump.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation announced on Tuesday that it had opened a competition investigation into Google, which two people familiar with the matter said would focus on dominance of the US group’s Android operating system and any harm caused to Chinese phonemakers, such as Oppo and Xiaomi, which use the software.
Chinese regulators, who announced a similar antitrust investigation into Nvidia in December, were now also looking at launching a formal probe into Intel, said two people familiar with the situation.
However, the nature of the probe into the US chipmaker remained unclear, one of the people said, adding whether it was officially launched could be affected by the state of US-China relations. President Xi Jinping is expected to speak to Trump in the coming days.
The tech investigations “may be part of the retaliatory measures,” made by China in response to Trump’s new tariffs against the country, said Liu Xu, a researcher at the National Strategy Institute of Tsinghua University.
Xu added that using antitrust investigations as a tool in trade negotiations might not be the best way to protect Chinese companies hit by US tariffs. “It would inevitably spark controversy,” he said.
Beijing’s scramble to build cases against prominent US tech companies comes as they are increasingly caught in the crossfire of growing tensions between the two global powers.
The Google probe, which regulators first began in 2019, had been shelved for years, but was reopened in December, according to two people familiar with the matter. That move came just before Trump was sworn in as US president, who had run an election campaign vowing to impose steep tariffs against Chinese goods.
Loading comments...
