Nvidia boss Jensen Huang meets the Federal Chancellor

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang is due to meet numerous representatives of European governments in the coming week. On Whit Monday, he will open the "Tech Week" conference in London with a discussion with British Investment Minister Poppy Gustafsson. Nvidia's own GPU Technology Conference (GTC) will follow on Tuesday as part of the "Viva Technology" conference in Paris. Both events have been advertising Huang as a star guest for some time.

From Paris, Huang will travel on to Berlin, as Handelsblatt claims to have learned from government circles. There, the Nvidia boss is said to have arranged talks with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Vice Chancellor. According to the report, the main topic of discussion was Nvidia's participation in the EU initiative "InvestAI". As part of this initiative, the European Union has launched a 20 billion euro funding program to establish four to five AI data centers in Europe. The new German government has also included a stronger commitment to AI in its coalition agreement.

Together with private investments, the total investment sum for the "AI Gigafactories" is expected to reach 200 billion euros. The facilities are likely to be equipped primarily with Nvidia GPUs, for which there are currently hardly any technical alternatives. As also previously reported by the Handelsblatt, SAP, Deutsche Telekom, Ionos, the Schwarz Group and Siemens are to be involved in the projects in Germany.

EU as possible compensation for China

It is questionable how many of the accelerators Nvidia can and wants to provide for the new data centers. For years, the demand for GPU computing power has constantly exceeded the amount of chips that Nvidia can produce at TSMC. Numerous CEOs of US tech companies are said to have already asked Jensen Huang in private conversations for more allocations of the rare GPUs. In contrast, the current negotiations with the EU may well be more transparent, as Huang's public appearances suggest.

In principle, Nvidia does not care whether it sells more GPUs to US companies or European cooperations such as InvestAI. In the US, the company is exempt from the Trump administration's punitive tariffs for the time being, as are other semiconductor manufacturers. However, export restrictions continue to apply to China, and Nvidia fears billions in losses as a result. However, the boom in business with GPUs for AI data centers is so great that this has no impact on the company's balance sheet: In the past two years, the quarterly turnover of Nvidia's data center division has more than quadrupled year-on-year to now over 39 billion US dollars.

(nie)