June 18, 2026, 14:49 GMT | Insight
A court defeat for EU regulators over their scrutiny of
Nvidia’s takeover of Run:ai would create a “huge headache” for reviews of deals that fall below notification thresholds, according to a senior Irish official. Geoffrey Gray said if EU member states couldn’t refer to the
European Commission deals they have “called in,” then it would see multiple different national authorities reviewing the same deal at different times.
A defeat for EU regulators over their scrutiny of Nvidia’s takeover of Run:ai would create a “huge headache” for reviews of dealmaking that falls below notification thresholds, according to a senior Irish official.
Geoffrey Gray said if EU member states couldn’t refer to the European Commission deals they have “called in,” it would see multiple different national authorities reviewing the same deal at different times.
“It just creates a huge headache,” he said at a conference* in Brussels, pointing how nine EU countries currently have call-in powers, with another 12 set to get them in the coming years. “So this is a real issue.”
“We’ll see, but it certainly will require a rethink of how we're thinking of calling in pan-European deals and how we engage on those.”
In recent years, a growing number of European countries have been introducing powers enabling them to “call in” mergers that don’t meet their normal review thresholds, but pose risks for competition.
The European Commission scrutinized Nvidia’s $700 million takeover of the AI startup in 2024 after Italy’s antitrust authority deployed its call-in power and then referred the deal to the EU watchdog.
Nvidia challenged the move at the EU’s General Court, which heard arguments at a hearing in March.
Gray said that call-in powers were a “pro-business” way of enabling regulators to scrutinize M&A transactions, as Ireland and other EU countries had introduced them in conjunction with raising their normal review thresholds.
“In Ireland, the thresholds are really, really low … which results in us reviewing a significant volume of transactions that have very little impact on competition,” said Gray, who is one of three members at the Irish Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.
“In Ireland, we had approximately 100 merger locations last year, and these new thresholds, which will come in on July 1, will mean that about half will no longer be reviewed,” he said.
“If you look at those nine countries that have introduced call-in powers, with the exception of Italy, nearly every single one of them have only called in one merger.”
* European Competition Forum Midsummer Meeting, Brussels, June 16-18, 2026
Please email editors@mlex.com to contact the editorial staff regarding this story or to submit the names of lawyers and advisers.
Tags
Sections:
Mergers & Acquisitions, Artificial Intelligence, DealRisk®
Industries:
Computing & Information Technology
Geographies:
Europe, European Union Member States