Intel slapped with €376m fine by EU competition regulators 

EU court originally wiped out a record €1bn penalty against the chipmaker over alleged illegal rebates offered to squeeze out rivals

Intel has been slapped with a fresh €376m fine by European Union competition regulators after an EU court had wiped out a one-time record €1bn penalty against the chipmaker.

The European Commission said it reimposed the smaller fine for “a previously established abuse of dominant position in the market for computer chips called x86 central processing units” after it found that Intel had “engaged in a series of anticompetitive practices aimed at excluding competitors from the relevant market in breach of EU antitrust rules”.

Intel already flagged earlier this year that the commission “reopened its administrative procedure to determine a fine against Intel based on” allegedly abusive conduct that had previously been established. 

Intel has significant facilities in Ireland and employs over 7,000 people at the Leixlip, Co Kildare plant and other locations here. Its most recent round of investments in the EU have been in Germany, France, and Italy.   

The company looked like it had won a historic victory in a ruling in 2022 that upended one of the EU’s most important competition cases. The EU General Court ruled that regulators made key errors in their 2009 decision over allegedly illegal rebates that Intel gave to PC makers to squeeze out rival Advanced Micro Devices. 

Still, the EU court “confirmed that Intel’s naked restrictions amounted to an abuse of dominant market position under EU competition rules”, the commission said. That’s why the commission now adopted “a new decision imposing a fine on Intel only for the naked restrictions”. Bloomberg and Irish Examiner staff