عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Technology

EU Accuses Microsoft of Breaching Antitrust Rules by Bundling Teams with Office Software 

The logo of Microsoft is seen outside it's French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, on May 13, 2024. (AP)
The logo of Microsoft is seen outside it's French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, on May 13, 2024. (AP)
TT
TT

EU Accuses Microsoft of Breaching Antitrust Rules by Bundling Teams with Office Software 

The logo of Microsoft is seen outside it's French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, on May 13, 2024. (AP)
The logo of Microsoft is seen outside it's French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, on May 13, 2024. (AP)

EU antitrust regulators on Tuesday charged Microsoft of illegally bundling its chat and video app Teams with its Office product and say that recent moves by the US tech giant to unbundle the package were insufficient and more needed to be done. 

"Microsoft has breached EU antitrust rules by tying its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular productivity applications included in its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365," the European Commission said in a statement. 

"The Commission preliminarily finds that these changes are insufficient to address its concerns and that more changes to Microsoft's conduct are necessary to restore competition," it said, referring to Microsoft's unbundling of Teams from Office announced in recent months. 

The move by the EU competition watchdog was triggered by a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app Slack. 

Teams was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free and subsequently replaced Skype for Business. Its popularity soared during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. 

Microsoft said it would work to find solutions to address EU regulators' concerns.  

Most Viewed

 
 
Technology

Nations Building Their Own AI Models Add to Nvidia's Growing Chip Demand

FILE PHOTO: AI (Artificial Intelligence) letters and robot hand miniature in this illustration, taken June 23, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: AI (Artificial Intelligence) letters and robot hand miniature in this illustration, taken June 23, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
TT
TT

Nations Building Their Own AI Models Add to Nvidia's Growing Chip Demand

FILE PHOTO: AI (Artificial Intelligence) letters and robot hand miniature in this illustration, taken June 23, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: AI (Artificial Intelligence) letters and robot hand miniature in this illustration, taken June 23, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

Nations building artificial intelligence models in their own languages are turning to Nvidia's chips, adding to already booming demand as generative AI takes center stage for businesses and governments, a senior executive said on Wednesday.
Nvidia's third-quarter forecast for rising sales of its chips that power AI technology such as OpenAI's ChatGPT failed to meet investors' towering expectations. But the company described new customers coming from around the world, including governments that are now seeking their own AI models and the hardware to support them, Reuters said.
Countries adopting their own AI applications and models will contribute about low double-digit billions to Nvidia's revenue in the financial year ending in January 2025, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said on a call with analysts after Nvidia's earnings report.
That's up from an earlier forecast of such sales contributing high single-digit billions to total revenue. Nvidia forecast about $32.5 billion in total revenue in the third quarter ending in October.
"Countries around the world (desire) to have their own generative AI that would be able to incorporate their own language, incorporate their own culture, incorporate their own data in that country," Kress said, describing AI expertise and infrastructure as "national imperatives."
She offered the example of Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, which is building an AI supercomputer featuring thousands of Nvidia H200 graphics processors.
Governments are also turning to AI as a measure to strengthen national security.
"AI models are trained on data and for political entities -particularly nations - their data are secret and their models need to be customized to their unique political, economic, cultural, and scientific needs," said IDC computing semiconductors analyst Shane Rau.
"Therefore, they need to have their own AI models and a custom underlying arrangement of hardware and software."
Washington tightened its controls on exports of cutting-edge chips to China in 2023 as it sought to prevent breakthroughs in AI that would aid China's military, hampering Nvidia's sales in the region.
Businesses have been working to tap into government pushes to build AI platforms in regional languages.
IBM said in May that Saudi Arabia's Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority would train its "ALLaM" Arabic language model using the company's AI platform Watsonx.
Nations that want to create their own AI models can drive growth opportunities for Nvidia's GPUs, on top of the significant investments in the company's hardware from large cloud providers like Microsoft, said Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research.