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Nvidia chief Jensen Huang said Europe’s shortfall in computing power for artificial intelligence “will be resolved” soon, as the continent pushes to catch up with the US and China in the race to capitalise on the fast-developing technology.
At least 20 AI data centres are planned across Europe in the next few years, Huang said at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Wednesday, as he predicted a tenfold increase in the region’s data centre capacity within the next two years.
This will include five “gigafactories” — sites carrying hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s powerful graphics processing units, the chips needed to train and run large language models.
“Europe is going all in on AI,” Huang said. “The amount of AI infrastructure being built here will increase by an order of magnitude in the next couple of years.”
Part of that growth will come from an expanded partnership between Nvidia and Mistral AI, the French start-up that has emerged as Europe’s best hope for a local developer capable of taking on AI rivals in the US and China such as OpenAI and DeepSeek.
Mistral, in which Nvidia is an investor, will deploy 18,000 of the chipmaker’s latest generation Blackwell GPUs at a new facility, in what its chief executive Arthur Mensch called a “transformative step” for the company that will “uphold Europe’s technological autonomy”. Mistral is building its first large-scale data centre in Essonne, just outside Paris, and plans to expand its infrastructure across Europe.
The announcement follows Huang’s warning in London on Monday that the UK was “missing” the infrastructure it needed to fulfil its AI potential, as Europe-based cloud providers Nscale and Nebius announced plans to build new facilities with thousands of Nvidia GPUs in the UK.
Deals such as these will bolster Nvidia’s efforts to promote “sovereign AI”. They are vital to diversifying its business from a small clutch of primarily American Big Tech companies that account for a huge share of its revenues.
Availability of local capital and reliable power supplies have been seen as a barrier to European AI capacity. Large AI facilities can cost tens of billions of dollars to build and consume huge amounts of energy.
A report last October by the consultancy McKinsey warned of “significant challenges” in scaling up European AI capacity, including limited sources of power, a lack of electrical engineering skills and slow planning processes. McKinsey projected that data centres in the region would require as much as $300bn in investment to meet demand and nearly triple their power consumption by the end of the decade.
In Paris on Wednesday, Huang touted a huge expansion of “indigenous-built AI infrastructure, here in Europe, by European companies, for the European market”, on top of the data centres being built by US cloud providers.
“Your AI shortage, your GPU shortage, will be resolved for you soon,” he told the researchers and start-ups in the audience at VivaTech.
