EU fined Intel $400 million for using its market power unfairly

The European Commission announced that it had reinstated a fine of 376.36 million euros ($400.26 million) to Intel on Friday. This fine was imposed due to Intel’s previous abuse of its strong position in the computer chip market.

The Commission says the fine is because Intel paid money to computer companies like Hewlett Packard, Acer, and Lenovo from 2002 and 2006. They did this to stop or slow down the release of products with rival x86 CPUs.

Last year, the court agreed that these payments were a misuse of market power, according to the Commission. However, they cancelled the entire fine because it wasn’t clear how much of it was connected to these actions.

Earlier, the EU’s General Court in 2022 partially cancelled a 1.06 billion euro fine that the Commission had imposed on Intel in 2009 for attempting to hinder competition from Advanced Micro Devices in the x86 central processing units (CPU) market.

During that time, the court disagreed with the Commission’s idea that Intel’s discounts to computer makers had messed up fair competition.