The General Court upheld the European Commission’s finding that Chipzilla engaged in anticompetitive conduct but cut the penalty from €376 million to €237,105,540 (about US$278 million).
The ruling in Case T-1129/23 Intel Corporation v Commission handed Chipzilla a partial win, as the revised fine is far smaller than the original €1.06 billion slapped on the company in 2009.
That earlier penalty, tied to alleged abuse of dominance in the x86 processor market, was largely annulled by the courts in 2022 after years of legal trench warfare.
The saga began in 2009 when the Commission accused Chipzilla of abusing its dominant position between 2002 and 2007 through two distinct types of conduct.
The first involved conditional or loyalty rebates, which made up the bulk of the original fine and targeted deals with PC makers, including Dell, HP, NEC, and Lenovo.
Those rebates were tied to buying all or nearly all x86 processors from Chipzilla, a practice Brussels said boxed out AMD by making defection commercially suicidal.
That part of the case collapsed in 2022 when the General Court ruled the Commission failed to carry out a proper economic assessment, including the required “as-efficient competitor” test.
What survived was the second strand, known in EU competition law as “naked restrictions”, which the court again upheld this week.
These involved payments to HP, Acer, and Lenovo between November 2002 and December 2006, conditional on delaying or cancelling products that used AMD processors.
The court agreed this conduct had no pro-competitive justification and was designed purely to exclude a rival from the market.
However, it agreed with Chipzilla that the €376 million fine reimposed in 2023 overstated the seriousness of the offence.
Judges in Luxembourg said the revised €237 million figure more accurately reflected the gravity and duration of the infringement.
They pointed to the limited scope of the conduct, which affected only a relatively small number of computer models rather than the entire market.
The court also noted gaps of around 12 months between some of the offending practices, undermining claims of a continuous exclusionary strategy.
Chipzilla failed on its remaining arguments, including claims that its rights of defence had been breached, with the court backing the Commission’s reliance on the surviving parts of the original case.
For Brussels, the ruling is a win that keeps its 2023 decision alive after the humiliation of the 2022 partial annulment.
In 2023, European commissioner Didier Reynders said the decision showed the Commission’s determination to ensure “that very serious antitrust breaches do not go unsanctioned”.
The legal soap opera may not be over yet, as Chipzilla and the Commission can appeal to the EU Court of Justice on points of law.