Days after Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company with its share price doubling this year alone, landing it a valuation of more than A$4.51 trillion, the company may be hit with an antitrust complaint.

French antitrust enforcers are preparing to charge the world’s most valuable chipmaker with allegedly anticompetitive practices, reported Reuters.

If true, it would be the first such action by any global regulator. The charge sheet — or statement of objections — follows a raid of Nvidia offices last year.

In September last year, French authorities raided the offices of a business it suspected was engaging in “anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector.” The regulators did not name the business, but Nvidia acknowledged that France and other entities were examining its business practices. Nvidia said that the French agency “collected information from us regarding our business and competition in the graphics card and cloud service provider market as part of an ongoing inquiry into competition in those markets.”

However, the regulators at the time noted that raids do not imply that the company broke the law. “Raids do not presuppose the existence of a breach of the law,” the country’s competition authority said in a statement at the time, “which only a full investigation into the merits of the case could establish, if appropriate.”

Now, if the media reports are true, French regulators have concluded that Nvidia breached the rules.

Nvidia has capitalised on the AI boom. Its chips are coveted by data center operators for their ability to handle massive amounts of information which is required to develop AI models.

In November, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that Nvidia’s dominance was causing “growing inequalities” between countries and stifling fair competition, reported Bloomberg. He said that 92 per cent of GPUs are from Nvidia. “If you want to have fair competition, you need to have many private companies and not one single company having the possibility of selling all the devices.”

Fines for breaching France’s antitrust law can be as high as 10 per cent of a company’s global annual revenue.

In February, Nvidia confirmed that authorities in the US, European Union, China and the UK were also looking into its operations. Specific charges aren’t yet clear, but regulators are believed to be looking at the company’s sales of graphics processors, efforts to secure supplies as well as its investments.

Apart from the French, the EU which has also been scrutinising the business and competitive practices of Big Tech players, might begin to take a closer look at Nvidia and its practices.