Nvidia Drops 3% as China Says the Company Violated Anti-Trust Laws

If you’re wondering why bitcoin’s (BTC) price is slipping for the past two hours, the possible culprit is pre-market trading on Wall Street, where shares of Nvidia (NVDA) have dropped nearly 3%.

The losses follow an announcement by China’s market regulator that Nvidia allegedly violated the country’s anti-monopoly laws during its acquisition of Israeli networking company Mellanox Technologies in 2020.

The regulator said that Nvidia breached the terms of its conditional approval related to that acquisition, although the specific details of the violations have not been disclosed.

The weakness in NVDA is accompanied by poor price action in the crypto market. As of writing, BTC traded at around $114,900, having reached a high of $116,755 earlier today. Top tokens associated with artificial intelligence, such as ICP, RENDER, FET, and GRT, traded over $ 4.5% lower on a 24-hour basis.

Chip-maker NVDA is the world’s largest publicly listed firm by market value and acts as a barometer for risk sentiment in financial markets, including cryptocurrencies and AI-related tokens.

Bitcoin (BTC) has historically taken cues from NVDA, with both bottoming out concurrently in late 2022 to embark on a record bull run.

The rolling three-month correlation between NVDA and BlackRock’s spot bitcoin ETF was 0.76 as of Friday, according to data source Macroaxis.