Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang will invest an additional $2 billion in Europe, building on the $8 billion the company has poured into the continent over the past year.
Huang outlined the plan in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on the 13th, Bloomberg reported. Nvidia, the world's largest maker of artificial intelligence chips, has pledged hundreds of billions of dollars in investments worldwide to accelerate AI adoption and drive demand for its products. The new targets include French startups Doctolib, Genesis AI, Pigment and Entalpic.
At the meeting, Huang pointed to open-source models as a way for Europe to catch up with more advanced AI in the United States. Open-source models can be cheaper to use and easier to modify. "Open models are important because they can be customized for each language and each sovereignty," he said.
Nvidia is a key partner of Mistral AI, the French company that designs open-weight models. It has invested in Mistral and supplies AI accelerator chips for the company's data centers. Mistral's latest model was trained on 4,000 Grace Blackwell chips. Huang and Macron also discussed investment in France, open-source software and AI safety.
Huang's arrival in Europe coincides with mounting public backlash against AI technology. Concerns ranging from the possibility that AI models slip out of control to the environmental impact of power-hungry data centers have fueled calls to slow development. Europe and Britain have focused on minimizing the harm AI could cause.
Huang has opposed calls to slow AI development, arguing that the technology will lift the economy and can be built safely. By contrast, some AI company chiefs, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, are weighing how to pace development after several serious security incidents caused by AI agents. Huang predicted that physical AI in the form of humanoid robots will be the next huge market for Nvidia's technology.
Among the companies Huang selected, Doctolib was founded in 2013 and provides software that handles administrative work for doctors and other medical workers. It has become the main way many European patients book appointments. Pigment develops AI-based enterprise software, and Entalpic applies AI to chemical and materials research. Genesis focuses on AI for robots.