Nvidia’s ‘Sovereign’ AI Could Win a Prize for Irony

Nvidia Corp. billionaire boss Jensen Huang, clad in his signature leather jacket, has been crisscrossing European capitals and sharing the stage with the likes of Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron as he pitches “sovereign” artificial intelligence, a vision of new data centers offering essential compute power within national borders rather than via dominant tech firms from abroad. But if there were prizes for irony, it’s a concept that might win a few.

Huang’s pitch has understandably struck a chord with leaders desperate for new sources of productivity gains and for ways to avoid falling terminally behind in a tech race dominated by the US and China. Recent announcements include a partnership with French AI startup Mistral to build a cloud platform powered by 18,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips and a Germany-based industrial cloud for European manufacturing built with 10,000 Blackwell chips. It’s not just Europe — Nvidia has cut big sovereign AI deals in the Middle East — but the Old Continent is where Huang sees computing capacity increase by a factor of 10 over the next two years. “It’s coming,” he said.