Nvidia Corp. announced a raft of projects aimed at bolstering artificial-intelligence infrastructure across Europe, including an expanded partnership with French startup Mistral AI.
CEO Jensen Huang made the announcements during a joint Nvidia-VivaTech event in Paris, part of a globe-trotting campaign to promote the adoption of AI and his company’s products. A data center buildout is needed in Europe to help countries there catch up in deploying the technology, he said.
The chipmaker is trying to expand the market for AI accelerators — the processors used to develop and run artificial intelligence 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 France, Nvidia will team up with Mistral to use local AI computing to run the startup’s services. 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.
In the UK, AI firms Nebius Group and Nscale Global Holdings Ltd. will use “thousands” of such semiconductors for their own platforms. Other countries, including Italy and Armenia, also are installing new hardware, Nvidia said.
In Europe, Nvidia is working with 1.5 million developers and 9,600 businesses, as well as 7,000 startups in what the company calls its inception program.
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“The only thing that’s missing is infrastructure,” 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.
Europe has lagged behind the US in developing the infrastructure for AI and hasn’t matched the spending promised in 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 startups to be a global competitor in AI.
Huang said at the GTC-VivaTech event that more than 20 so-called AI factories are being planned and built across Europe in the next two years, with “several” of them being “gigafactories.” The larger facilities will be home to over 100,000 chips. It calculates that AI hardware capacity in Europe will grow by three times next year.
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“We will increase the amount of AI computing capacity in Europe by a factor of 10,” he said.
Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia has transformed its fortunes over the last three years and now gets almost as much revenue per quarter as Intel Corp., its longtime nemesis, gets in a year.
Much of that money come from AI accelerator chips, which are used by a cadre of giant companies to develop AI software and services. That group, which includes Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc., provides about half of Nvidia’s total sales. The chipmaker is looking to reach a wider market by promoting the use of smaller-scale systems by companies and countries.
Adding to a previous announcement, Nvidia said Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS, Mistral and others are joining the chipmaker’s Lepton service, which helps connect AI developers with the computing hardware they need.
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.
