Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) has been pitching the idea of “sovereign artificial intelligence” (AI) since 2023. Europe is starting to listen and act.
The concept is based on the idea that the language, knowledge, history and culture of each region are different, and every nation needs to develop and own its AI.
Last week, Huang toured Europe’s major capitals — London, Paris and Berlin — announcing a slew of projects and partnerships, while highlighting the lack of AI infrastructure in the region. In a place where leaders are increasingly wary of the continent’s dependency on a handful of US tech companies and after drawing ire from US President Donald Trump, Huang’s vision has started to gain traction.
Photo: Reuters
“We are going to invest billions in here ... but Europe needs to move into AI quickly,” Huang said in Paris on Wednesday last week.
On Monday last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced ￡1 billion (US$1.4 billion) in funding to scale up computing power in a global race “to be an AI maker and not an AI taker.”
French President Emmanuel Macron called building AI infrastructure “our fight for sovereignty” at the Viva Technology (VivaTech) conference, one of the largest global tech fairs.
After Nvidia laid out plans to build an AI cloud platform in Germany with Deutsche Telekom AG, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called it an “important step” for the digital sovereignty and economic future of Europe’s top economy.
Europe lags behind the US and China as its cloud infrastructure is mostly run by Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google, and it has only a few smaller AI companies, such as Mistral AI SAS to rival US ones.
“There’s no reason why Europe shouldn’t have tech champions,” said 31-year-old Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, sitting beside Huang, at a panel at VivaTech. “This is a gigantic dream.”
In France, Mistral has partnered with Nvidia to build a data center to power the AI needs of European companies with a homegrown alternative.
It would use 18,000 of the latest Nvidia AI chips in the first phase, with plans to expand across multiple sites next year.
In February, the EU announced plans to build four “AI gigafactories” at a cost of US$20 billion to reduce dependence on US firms.
The European Commission has been in touch with Huang and he had told the EU executive that he was going to allocate some chip production to Europe for the gigafactories, an EU official told Reuters.
Nvidia’s graphics processing units are crucial for building AI data centers from the US to Japan and India to the Middle East.
In Europe, a push for sovereign AI could reshape the tech landscape with domestic cloud providers, AI start-ups, and chipmakers standing to gain from new government funding and a shift toward in-region data infrastructure.
Nvidia also wants to cement demand for its AI chips, ensuring that even as countries seek independence, they still rely on its technology to get there.
The push is not without challenges. High electricity costs and rising demand could strain sourcing of electricity for data centers. Data centers account for 3 percent of EU electricity demand, but their consumption is expected to increase rapidly this decade due to AI.
Mistral, which has raised just more than US$1 billion, is trying to become a European homegrown champion with a fraction of the money US large data-center operators, also called hyperscalers, spend in a month.
“Hyperscalers are spending US$10 billion to US$15 billion per quarter in their infrastructure. Who in Europe can afford that exactly?” said Pascal Brier, chief innovation officer at Capgemini SE, a partner of Nvidia and Mistral. “It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything, but we have to be cognizant about the fact that there will always be a gap.”
Mistral has launched several AI models, which are used by businesses, but companies tend to mix them with models from other companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Meta Platforms Inc.
“Most of the time it’s not Mistral or the rest, it’s Mistral and the rest,” Brier said.
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