Since 2023, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, has been promoting the concept of “sovereign AI.” Now, Europe is beginning to pay attention and take action.
The theory is founded on the notion that every country must build and possess its own AI since every region has a unique language, knowledge base, history, and culture. While underlining the dearth of AI infrastructure in the area, the CEO of the artificial intelligence chipmaker traveled to London, Paris, and Berlin this week to announce a number of initiatives and collaborations. After angering US President Donald Trump, his concept has begun to gather steam in a region where politicians are growing increasingly concerned about the continent’s reliance on a small number of U.S. tech corporations.
“We are going to invest billions in here … but Europe needs to move into AI quickly,” Huang said on Wednesday in Paris. On Monday of last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced 1 billion pounds ($1.35 billion) in funding to scale up computing power in a global race “to be an AI maker and not an AI taker.”
At VivaTech, one of the biggest international tech conferences, French President Emmanuel Macron referred to the development of AI infrastructure as “our fight for sovereignty.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz described Nvidia’s ambitions to establish an AI cloud platform in Germany with Deutsche Telekom as a “significant step” for the digital sovereignty and economic future of the continent’s largest economy.
Because Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet’s Google dominate its cloud infrastructure and there aren’t many smaller AI firms like Mistral to compete with the U.S. ones, Europe lags behind both China and the U.S.
“There’s no reason why Europe shouldn’t have tech champions,” said 31-year-old Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, sitting beside Huang, who has led Nvidia for more than three decades, at a panel at VivaTech.
“This is a gigantic dream.”
Gigafactory plans unleashed
In order to meet the AI demands of European businesses with a domestic substitute, Mistral and Nvidia have teamed together to construct a data center in France.
In the initial stage, 18,000 of the newest Nvidia AI chips will be used, with plans to spread out over many locations in 2026. To lessen reliance on American companies, the European Union unveiled plans in February to construct four “AI gigafactories” at a cost of $20 billion.
According to an EU official who spoke to media, Huang had informed the EU executive that he was planning to assign some chip manufacturing to Europe for these companies after speaking with the European Commission.
The Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs, chips from Nvidia are essential for the construction of AI data centers in the US, Japan, India, and the Middle East.
With local cloud providers, AI startups, and chipmakers poised to benefit from fresh government investment and a shift toward in-region data infrastructure, a push for sovereign AI may completely change the IT landscape in Europe.
Additionally, Nvidia hopes to solidify demand for its AI processors so that nations continue to depend on its technology while they strive for independence.
Power costs
There are difficulties in the push. Data center power sourcing may be strained by high electricity prices and growing demand. Although data centers only make about 3% of the power demand in the EU, artificial intelligence is predicted to cause a sharp rise in data center use this decade.
Having funded little over $1 billion, Mistral is attempting to become a domestic champion in Europe using a fraction of the monthly budgets of huge data-center operators or U.S. hyperscalers.
“Hyperscalers are spending $10 billion to $15 billion per quarter in their infrastructure. Who in Europe can afford that exactly?” said Pascal Brier, chief innovation officer at Capgemini, a partner of both Nvidia and Mistral.
“It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything, but we have to be cognizant about the fact that there will always be a gap.”
Businesses employ a number of Mistral’s AI models, but they frequently combine them with models from other firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Platforms.
“Most of the time it’s not Mistral or the rest, it’s Mistral and the rest,” Brier said.
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