Jensen Huang's Nvidia bets on Europe with $2 billion AI plan

The London stage was part of a broader European charm offensive that started in Paris, where Huang met Emmanuel Macron. There, he set the tone for the trip by promising more deal announcements within days. In London, the setting was an old converted church, and Huang addressed tech executives, venture capitalists, Nvidia employees, and British politicians. He singled out Josh Payne, CEO of the U.K. neocloud Nscale, telling the crowd that Payne and his company were a "zero" before Nvidia invested and helped recruit their board; Nscale is now about to go public, targeting a valuation of up to $35 billion. The trip also folded in a commitment of $250 million worth of compute over five years for U.K. AI safety and security research, with more announcements expected at Nvidia's GTC Berlin event next week.

The strategic logic runs deeper than generosity. Nvidia is now worth $5 trillion, and keeping that valuation going up may depend on finding buyers beyond the handful of U.S. hyperscalers that still account for roughly half its data center sales. Sovereign AI revenue is already growing, tripling to more than $30 billion last fiscal year. Each national "AI factory" and European startup training on Nvidia hardware is a customer that isn't Microsoft or Meta, which helps reassure investors. The concern is that this pattern mirrors one that has made some investors nervous: Nvidia increasingly funds its own customers. Reports in late July that it was weighing a guarantee for $250 billion in financing for an OpenAI data center in Ohio knocked about 5% off its shares on July 27 and sent the cost of insuring its debt sharply higher; Nvidia later cut the guarantee to about $105 billion. Huang's response is that Nvidia can enable sovereignty by letting local providers operate its full-stack AI platform themselves, and that so long as you can operate the service yourself, that is what matters most.