Intel's $1.45 billion EU antitrust fine is officially history
A €1.06 billion EU antitrust penalty on chipmaker Intel for abuse of dominance dating back to 2009 (when it was equivalent to $1.45 billion)
A €1.06 billion EU antitrust penalty on chipmaker Intel for abuse of dominance dating back to 2009 (when it was equivalent to $1.45 billion) has been consigned to the history books after the bloc’s top court rejected the Commission’s appeal against a 2022 lower court ruling that annulled the sanction.
“The Court of Justice dismisses the Commission’s appeal, thereby upholding the judgment of the General Court,” the CJEU wrote in a press release Thursday.
The portion of the EU enforcement that failed concerned “conditional rebates” Intel provided to computer makers for using its chips. The Commission had argued that these rebates were anti-competitive, but the judges ultimately disagreed.
However Intel hasn’t won everything: the 2022 ruling confirmed its “naked restrictions” as unlawful — practices consisting of paying PC makers to halt or delay production of products containing rival chips. The chipmaker did not appeal this finding, which is why the EU issued a new fine last fall of around $400 million.
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From Wikipedia:
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware.[3] Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer components and related products for business and consumer markets.
It is considered one of the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue[4][5] and ranked in the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years, until it was removed from the ranking in 2018.[6] In 2020, it was reinstated and ranked 45th, being the 7th-largest technology company in the ranking.
Intel supplies microprocessors for most manufacturers of computer systems, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). It also manufactures chipsets, network interface controllers, flash memory, graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and other devices related to communications and computing. Intel has a strong presence in the high-performance general-purpose and gaming PC market with its Intel Core line of CPUs, whose high-end models are among the fastest consumer CPUs, as well as its Intel Arc series of GPUs. The open source Technology Center at Intel hosts PowerTOP and LatencyTOP, and supports other open source projects such as Wayland, Mesa, Threading building blocks (TBB), and Xen.[7]
Intel (Integrated electronics) was founded on July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore's law) and Robert Noyce, along with investor Arthur Rock, and is associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove.[8] The company was a key component of the rise of Silicon Valley as a high-tech center,[9] as well as being an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, which represented the majority of its business until 1981. Although Intel created the world's first commercial microprocessor chip—the Intel 4004—in 1971, it was not until the success of the PC in the early 1990s that this became its primary business.
During the 1990s, the partnership between Microsoft Windows and Intel, known as "Wintel", became instrumental in shaping the PC landscape[10][11] and solidified Intel's position on the market. As a result, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs in the mid to late 1990s, fostering the rapid growth of the computer industry.
During this period, it became the dominant supplier of PC microprocessors, with a market share of 90%,[12] and was known for aggressive and anti-competitive tactics in defense of its market position, particularly against AMD, as well as a struggle with Microsoft for control over the direction of the PC industry.[13][14]
Since the 2000s and especially since the late 2010s, Intel has faced increasing competition, which has led to a reduction in Intel's dominance and market share in the PC market.[15] Nevertheless, with a 68.4% market share as of 2023, Intel still leads the x86 market by a wide margin.[16] In addition, Intel's ability to design and manufacture its own chips is considered a rarity in the semiconductor industry,[17] as most chip designers do not have their own production facilities and instead rely on contract manufacturers (e.g. AMD and Nvidia).[18]