US chip giant Nvidia is making a push into Europe with a host of new projects and partnerships announced this week to build up the region’s compute capacity. The move has raised concerns that Europe is once again outsourcing key technologies to foreign players.
On Wednesday Nvidia founder Jensen Huang opened France’s flagship tech event VivaTech in Paris with a keynote speech in which he promised that his company will increase the amount of AI computing capacity in Europe “by a factor of ten” in the next two years.
Huang pitched the move as critical to enable Europe’s AI sector to thrive independently from large US cloud companies, which currently provide most of the compute power needed to develop AI models.
It comes as an emerging group of European AI cloud providers — including the likes of UK’s Nscale, Sweden’s evroc and the Netherlands Nebius — pitch VCs for billions of euros of investment and announce plans to deploy Nvidia’s chips across the region, as they look to tap into growing calls for sovereignty on key tech infrastructure.
“Outsourcing all of your intelligence makes no sense,” said Huang at the event. “You have to have some ability to develop your own intelligence.”
The move was hailed as good news for the development of homegrown AI, but some observers questioned Huang’s pitch in defence of European sovereignty.
“Is it really sovereignty if our chips depend on an American company?” Marieke Flament, an investor and cofounder of trade publication Euro Stable Watch, tells Sifted. “If we don’t build our own capabilities and learn, are we not creating further dependence?”
What did Huang announce?
Huang made a number of announcements at VivaTech, including the deployment of tens of thousands of Nvidia Grace Blackwell Superchips — GPUs specialised for AI — across multiple sites in several European countries. He also announced plans to build 20 data centres and five gigafactories dedicated to AI across the region.
“Your AI shortage, your GPU shortage, will be resolved for you soon,” said Huang. “It’s coming for you.”
Huang also announced a headline-grabbing partnership with buzzy AI startup Mistral, described as “historical” by French president Emmanuel Macron. This will see Mistral expand to providing compute and cloud services to European AI enterprises and the public sector thanks to infrastructure powered by 18k Nvidia Blackwell chips.
To accomplish this Mistral and Nvidia are working in partnership with French public bank Bpifrance and UAE investment fund MGX to build a 1.4 gigawatt data centre campus near Paris, a similar size to some of the data centres built by hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft.
These projects, said Huang, will enable the development of “indigenous-built AI infrastructure here in Europe, by European companies, for the European market.”
Earlier this week, speaking at London Tech Week, Huang similarly noted the UK is missing its own sovereign AI infrastructure. It came as UK AI data centre startup Nscale announced it would deploy 10k Nvidia Blackwell GPUs by 2026.
“Technological independence is linked to who owns the infrastructure and who owns what’s hosted in the infrastructure. And what’s hosted is Nvidia chips,” Matthieu Gallego, head of data centres for France, Luxembourg and Morocco at advisory firm RLB, tells Sifted.
“Sovereignty is only a facade to expand to Europe… There’s a real opportunity and Nvidia has understood that.”
Relying on Nvidia
Others point towards rising geopolitical tensions with the Donald Trump-led US administration as cause for concern.
“Nvidia is a US tech company,” says Tanya Goodin, founder and CEO at UK-based AI advisory startup EthicAI. “Let’s just hope that the current administration doesn’t at some future point decide to restrict chip exports to the UK and Europe as part of any future negotiations or disagreements.”
An Nvidia spokesperson told Sifted: “We’re confident that the US administration recognises the importance of working with partners and allies to advance AI globally.”
With Nvidia completely dominating the chip market, others note European companies have little choice when it comes to building AI infrastructure.
“Nvidia is currently in a dominant position when it comes to training AI algorithms, so it is natural to see it taking a position on Europe’s AI infrastructure,” says Sylvain Dubois, the cofounder of Belgian semiconductor startup Vertical Compute.
“But it is vital for European sovereignty to keep all options open and not only follow Nvidia’s closed architectures, to avoid returning to a 10-year-long cycle of dominance.”
“Ideally, we should be saying: ‘We don’t have a choice, so we’ll start with Nvidia, but we’ll enable and fund the ecosystem to develop alternative solutions’,” says Philippe Notton, the cofounder of French semiconductor startup SiPearl.
Notton says Europe’s ecosystem is maturing, from semiconductors to AI software, with products expected to hit the market in the coming years. Supporting that ecosystem will be critical, he says, particularly thanks to public procurement.
Boosting European AI
Despite these concerns, Nvidia’s push into Europe has also been hailed as a positive development for the sector. “It pushes the ecosystem forward,” says Notton. “We need more products.”
“There’s no time to remain sceptical when it comes to building a European AI computing infrastructure,” says Frank Riemann, head of strategy at Berlin-based AI infrastructure company BrainQubes. “Europe is standing empty-handed when it comes to AI computing capacities.”
If anything, he adds, the announcements fall short of what’s needed — especially compared to leading countries like the US, where in January the government unveiled a $500bn infrastructure plan for AI dubbed Stargate. US tech giant OpenAI is reported to be participating in plans to build a 5 gigawatt data centre in Abu Dhabi, while also developing a 1.2 gigawatt data centre in the US.
“We are at very early stages compared to what’s happening abroad,” says RLB’s Gallego.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/nvidias-big-european-push-raises-questions-for-sovereignty/
