According to Bloomberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been crisscrossing Europe, announcing on the 13th an additional $2 billion (about RMB 13.41 billion) in investment on top of existing commitments. This is no one-off move — he revealed that over the past year Nvidia has already invested $8 billion (about RMB 53.64 billion) in Europe, and this is merely another step up. As the world's largest AI chipmaker, Huang has pledged to invest hundreds of billions of dollars around the world, both to mature AI applications and, conveniently, to drive demand for his own chips.
On this trip, he held face-to-face talks with French President Macron, covering investment in France, open-source software, and AI safety; the two sides also arranged for Huang to visit London and Berlin along the way. At the first stop of his Paris event, he issued a stark warning: "Europe must join this competition."
Betting on Open Source and Physical AI, Four French Companies Secured
The direction of his moves is clear: Huang is urging Europe to catch up with the American frontier by leveraging open-source models, arguing that open weights cost less and can be customized to languages and "technology sovereignty" needs. Nvidia is already a key partner of France's Mistral AI — both investing money and supplying chips; the latter trained its latest model Le Chonk on 4000 Grace Blackwell units. This time he is injecting capital into four more French startups: Doctolib, a medical appointment platform; Pigment, a maker of enterprise AI management software; Entalpic, which applies AI to chemical materials; and Genesis AI, which focuses on robotics.
It is easy to see that Huang wants to use capital to tie Europe to Nvidia's orbit, both diluting the market's dependence on a few American giants and paving the way for "physical AI" — he predicts that the next gold mine, exemplified by humanoid robots, is waiting for Nvidia to dig. But as opposition grows among the European public over runaway models and data-center power consumption, whether this high-stakes gamble can win understanding remains an open question.