Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had a pointed message for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz: regulation depends on industry growth. Put another way, you need something worth regulating before the rulebook matters.
The remark came as Huang and Merz announced a strategic partnership in Berlin aimed at modernizing German industry with AI.
What Nvidia and Germany agreed to
The two sides unveiled the partnership on October 19, 2026, during the Invest in Germany Summit in Berlin. The event ran October 19 to 20 and gathered about 200 business leaders.
German authorities and Nvidia signed a letter of intent at the summit to push industrial AI applications forward.
Nvidia will supply chips, software, and engineers. The German government will coordinate partners and provide the funding.
That funding is anticipated to land in the high hundreds of millions of euros.
The goal is to develop specialized, open AI models built for industrial use cases.
Computing power will come through the Industrial AI Cloud, which Deutsche Telekom operates using Nvidia’s latest Blackwell GPUs.
Roughly a dozen German companies are expected to take part. Siemens and Audi are among the names in the mix.
A partnership born from tough love
Before the summit, Huang said he was pained by the state of Germany’s AI progress.
Huang has also raised concerns about data sovereignty in AI. Both sides have committed to keeping control of the data and applications inside Germany.
The arrangement also builds on earlier groundwork. In 2025, Deutsche Telekom and Nvidia launched the Industrial AI Cloud project to create sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe.
Merz, who has been chancellor since May 6, 2025, is positioning the initiative as a response to competitive pressure from countries such as the United States.
What this means for Germany, Nvidia, and European tech
Huang’s framing of regulation is the most revealing piece of this story. By tying regulation to industry growth, he is effectively arguing that Europe’s rule-making should follow, not precede, a thriving AI sector.
There are real risks to watch. A letter of intent is not a finished contract, and the funding is anticipated rather than locked in. Coordinating roughly a dozen large companies, each with its own priorities and timelines, is a project management challenge in its own right.
The near-term markers to watch are straightforward. Look for the funding to be formally committed, for the participating companies to be fully named, and for the first industrial models to emerge from the Industrial AI Cloud.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.