Nvidia Pledges Another $2 Billion in Europe as Buying Spree Deepens

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says his company will unveil another $2 billion in European AI deals within a week, on top of the roughly $8 billion it has already put into the continent over the past year. Huang made the pledge in Paris, where he met French President Emmanuel Macron before continuing a European tour that stops this week in London and at GTC Berlin.

The London leg came with hard numbers and stage theatrics. Nvidia announced minority stakes in five U.K. startups and committed $250 million worth of compute over five years to U.K. AI safety and security research.

"I am giving you money! And I am giving you money! And I am giving you money!" Huang shouted from a stage in a converted church to a crowd of tech executives, venture capitalists, Nvidia employees and British politicians, in what Fortune's Beatrice Nolan described as an excellent Oprah Winfrey impression.

Huang singled out Josh Payne, CEO of the Nvidia-backed U.K. neocloud Nscale, telling him from the stage that he and his company were a "zero" before Nvidia invested and helped recruit their board. Nscale is now preparing to go public, targeting a valuation of up to $35 billion.

Why is Nvidia spending so freely in Europe?

The spending fits a familiar pattern. Much of the money will likely flow back to Nvidia, either through direct GPU purchases or through AI companies renting cloud capacity from data center operators that buy large volumes of Nvidia chips, Fortune reports.

The backed startups are hungry for scarce, expensive compute. Investing keeps them building on Nvidia's chips and software, and cuts the odds they switch to rival hardware such as Google's TPUs or AWS's Trainium and Inferentia chips.

It also positions Nvidia as the default supplier for Europe's "sovereign AI" push. The risk for Europe, as Fortune notes, is that sovereignty ends up meaning dependence on a single American chipmaker.

Huang pushed back on that reading. Sovereignty, he argued, depends on who controls the data, the service, and the ability to advance the technology — not simply on where chips are made. Nvidia can enable sovereignty by letting local providers operate its full-stack AI platform themselves.

"So long as you can operate the service yourself, that's the most important," Huang said.

What does this mean for Nvidia's $5 trillion valuation?

The stakes are financial as much as geopolitical. Nvidia is now worth more than $5 trillion, and sustaining that valuation may depend on finding buyers beyond the handful of U.S. hyperscalers — Microsoft, Meta and peers — that still account for roughly half its data center sales.

Nvidia's sovereign AI revenue already tripled to more than $30 billion last fiscal year, according to Dealroom. Every national "AI factory," as Huang calls data centers running AI workloads, is a customer that isn't a hyperscaler — a point that reassures investors worried the AI boom rests on Big Tech capex budgets alone.

But the European tour is a smaller version of a strategy that has made some of those investors nervous. Nvidia increasingly funds its own customers, from multibillion-dollar stakes in OpenAI and other AI labs to a reported guarantee it weighed for $250 billion in financing for an OpenAI data center in Ohio. That July news knocked about 5% off Nvidia's shares on July 27 and sent the cost of insuring its debt sharply higher. Nvidia later cut the guarantee to about $105 billion.

Critics call the model circular financing: Nvidia invests in a startup, the startup buys Nvidia chips, and Nvidia books the revenue. It works while AI demand climbs. If it stalls, Nvidia gets hit twice — as a supplier and as a shareholder.

Huang addressed the criticism directly. Nvidia invests "a small percentage of ultimately what the company has to raise" and is "highly informed" and "disciplined" about it, he said, adding that AI companies need more money than venture capital alone can provide.

"It is also strategically super smart to do because everybody we invest in is connected into Nvidia's ecosystem, and so we're making our platform more vibrant, and we're able to reach into new markets we otherwise couldn't," Huang said.

More announcements are expected at GTC Berlin next week. Huang's bet, for now, is that Europe — and the rest of the world — keeps buying.

By Amara Osei