Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) yesterday projected that Europe’s artificial-intelligence (AI) computing capacity will increase by a factor of 10 over the next two years, with more than 20 so-called AI factories in the works.
“Europe has now awakened to the importance of these AI factories,” Huang said. Several of massive data centers will have more than a gigawatt of capacity, potentially ranking them among the largest in the world, he said during a company event jointly held with the VivaTech tech conference in Paris.
“The researchers, the start-ups, your AI shortage, your GPU shortage will be resolved for you soon,” he said. “It’s coming.”
Photo: Thibaud Moritz, AFP
Europe lags behind the US in developing the infrastructure for AI and hasn’t matched the spending committed by other regions. Huang said at an event in London on Monday with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer that a lack of infrastructure was holding back growth in a country that otherwise had the expertise and start-ups to be a global competitor in AI. His visits to London and Paris are part of a globe-trotting campaign to promote the adoption of AI and his company’s products.
While in Paris, Huang announced a raft of projects aimed at bolstering AI infrastructure across Europe. Nvidia is teaming up with Mistral AI to use local computing to run the startup’s services. “We’re going to build an AI cloud together,” Huang said.
An offering called Mistral Compute will tap 18,000 new Grace Blackwell chips from Nvidia. It will be developed in Mistral’s data center in Essonne, France, and the company plans to roll it out to other locations in Europe.
The chipmaker is trying to expand the market for AI accelerators — the processors used to develop and run AI models. Nvidia is pushing for countries to deploy technology on a national level and trying to make it easier for individual companies to get the benefits from AI.
In the UK, AI firms Nebius Group NV and Nscale Global Holdings Ltd will use thousands of such semiconductors for their own platforms. Other countries, including Italy and Armenia, are also installing new hardware, Nvidia said.
In Europe, Nvidia is working with 1.5 million developers and 9,600 businesses, as well as 7,000 start-ups in what the company calls its inception program.
“The only thing that’s missing is infrastructure” for Europe to keep pace in AI, Dion Harris, Nvidia’s director of data center and high-performance computing, said in a briefing ahead of the presentations. Nvidia is working with cloud and telecommunications companies across Europe, he said.
Huang also announced yesterday that Nvidia will be building what he called “the world’s first industrial AI cloud,” which would be used to design and simulate the construction of everything from wind tunnels to robots to cars. Nvidia said in a statement that the Germany-based project will feature 10,000 graphics processing units, as well as several of its systems and servers.
Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia has transformed its fortunes over the last three years and now earns almost as much revenue per quarter as Intel Corp, its longtime nemesis, does in a year.
About half of the company’s sales come from AI accelerator chips, which are used by many of the world’s biggest companies, including Microsoft Corp and Meta Platforms Inc, to develop AI software and services. Nvidia is looking to reach a wider market by promoting the use of smaller-scale systems by companies and countries.
Amazon.com Inc’s AWS, Mistral and others are joining Nvidia’s Lepton service, which helps connect AI developers with the computing hardware they need, the company said. It previously said cloud computing providers CoreWeave Inc and Softbank Group Corp used the service.
Nvidia said that European countries need help to get AI models deployed that are based on local languages and data. It’s providing software and services that will accelerate those efforts.
Separately, Nvidia said that vehicles using its chips and software are starting to appear on the road — the result of years of work. Mercedes-Benz Group AG’s CLA models and forthcoming vehicles from Volvo and Jaguar will rely on its Drive platform.
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