Jensen Huang says Nvidia will announce $2B of European investments within a week, on top of $8B over the past year, and named four French startups in Paris. Nvidia committed more than $40B to AI equity in the first four months of this year alone.
Jensen Huang says Nvidia will announce $2B of European investments within a week. He was speaking in Paris on the first day of a tour that also takes in London and Berlin.
That follows $8B put into the continent over the past year, Bloomberg reported. He also announced funding for four French startups, Doctolib, Genesis AI, Pigment and Entalpic.
The sums are modest by Nvidia’s standards. The company was worth about $5.7T this month, while ASML, Europe’s most valuable listed company, stood near $700B in July.
“Europe needs to get in the race,” Huang said at the event, where he pitched open-source models as cheaper, more adaptable and the way for the continent to close the gap.
One cheque explains the ranking. Nvidia was reported in September to be weighing up to $10B as an anchor investor in Anthropic’s flotation, more than Mistral’s entire round.
That round, €3B at a valuation above €21B, is the largest any European tech company has raised. Huang has pledged hundreds of billions worldwide.
Nvidia also owns much of its own demand. Its equity holdings reached $99B by July, in companies that buy its chips, up from about $7B a year earlier.
The pitch to Europe is sovereignty. Open models matter because they can be customised for languages and for your own sovereignty, Huang said, and they cost less to run.
He is not the first supplier to say it. Alibaba’s chairman told a Turin audience six days earlier that open source is the only way for Europe to be truly independent.
Neither man is European and both sell the inputs. Open weights lower the cost of the model and leave the hardware bill exactly where it was, which is with Nvidia.
Mistral is the test. It trained Large 4 on 4,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs in European data centres, and publishes the weights on 27 October.
One of the new investments has already repriced. A secondary sale in April valued Doctolib at €3.6B, a 38% discount to the €5.8B it carried after its 2022 raise.
The venue is probably Berlin. Nvidia’s GTC conference runs there from 20 to 22 October, inside the week Huang described, and he arrives as European calls to slow AI development grow.