Hot-on-the-heels from London Tech Week Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang continued his European infrastructure offensive at VivaTech in Paris last week, pledging to help bolster digital sovereignty, energise economic growth and solidify the continent’s position as a leader in the emerging “AI industrial revolution”. Speaking from the stage at the French capital’s expo, […]
Hot-on-the-heels from London Tech Week Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang continued his European infrastructure offensive at VivaTech in Paris last week, pledging to help bolster digital sovereignty, energise economic growth and solidify the continent’s position as a leader in the emerging “AI industrial revolution”.
Speaking from the stage at the French capital’s expo, the black t-shirted tech leader – famed for his trademark Tom Ford leather jackets – framed AI as the essential infrastructure of modern times, likening it to electricity or the internet.
“Every industrial revolution begins with infrastructure. AI is the essential infrastructure of our time, just as electricity and the internet once were,” said Huang, calling on Europe to exercise “bold leadership” in shaping innovation and prosperity for future generations.
The announcement builds on a wave of strategic partnerships across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK last week, including collaborations with major telcos such as Orange, Swisscom, Telefónica and Telenor, as well as emerging cloud and AI providers including France’s Mistral AI, Switzerland’s Nebius and Germany’s Nscale.
Pan‑European compute
In France Huang announced that Mistral AI will deploy 18,000 Grace‑Blackwell systems in a multi‑site cloud platform, enabling rapid deployment of agentic AI applications across the continent.
Additionally in Germany – where Huang would land later last week – Nvidia and partners announced they were constructing “the world’s first industrial AI cloud”, powered by 10,000 Blackwell GPUs via DGX B200s and RTX PRO servers.
Huang explained: “In the era of AI, every manufacturer needs two factories: one for making things, and one for creating the intelligence that powers them.”
The first of these ‘factories’ will be in Germany and operated by Deutsche Telekom. It aims to power applications from engineering simulations to robotic factory twins.
“By building Europe’s first industrial AI infrastructure, we’re enabling the region’s leading industrial companies to advance simulation-first, AI-driven manufacturing,” Huang added.
Meanwhile in Italy, sovereign AI infrastructure is being advanced with native provider Domyn (formerly known as iGenius) which has chosen the nation’s existing supercomputing platform, “Colosseum”, equipped with NVIDIA chips.
These announcements mark a significant shift in Europe’s AI landscape. At London Tech Week, Huang characterised the UK’s ecosystem as “Goldilocks”—boasting strong research and private investment—but said Britain risked falling behind due to weak compute infrastructure.
Over at VivaTech, Huang struck a more continental chord, urging Europe to match ambition with bricks and GPUs.
Nvidia pledging to bolster infrastructure in Europe
Observers note that despite sizeable private investment, Europe still lags the US and China on raw compute power—making sovereign GPU projects crucial for both competitiveness and regulatory autonomy.
Telcos as critical infrastructure partners
Beyond cloud and manufacturing deployments, Nvidia is leaning heavily on Europe’s telcos to help build sovereign AI infrastructure. Orange Business, for instance, has joined Nvidia’s Cloud Partner Network.
This means the company’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform, Cloud Avenue, and its SaaS-based multimodal AI solution Live Intelligence are now integrated with high-performance Nvidia GPUs. Orange says this will enable it to deliver generative AI, agentic AI, and personal assistants to its enterprise customers — with a strong emphasis on data security and compliance.
The starting point, according to Usman Javaid, chief product & marketing officer at Orange Business, is to drive AI adoption for enterprises by offering a choice of infrastructures based on need and use case.
“We need to move away from the old telco model of building infrastructure first and expecting demand to follow,” Javaid told TechInformed at VivaTech last week.
“The starting point should be the problem we’re solving for the enterprise — then designing the right infrastructure around that.”
The Orange exec added that enterprises face increasing risks from shadow AI, with over 70% of employees using public AI tools that raise compliance and data security concerns. “Our goal is to help organisations adopt AI responsibly by providing secure, flexible infrastructure options — whether that’s public cloud, sovereign infrastructure, or private cloud environments tailored to sensitive use cases,” he said.
Javaid added that Orange Business is positioning itself as a trusted infrastructure layer, enabling enterprises to build and deploy AI while relying on secure, sovereign hosting.
“That’s the real challenge — driving AI adoption, building use cases, and helping enterprises solve pressing problems. But behind all of that, you need a different type of infrastructure.
“Some organisations are comfortable with public cloud, while others need sovereign or private environments due to regulatory or data sensitivity concerns. Enterprises want choice — and that’s what we’re delivering.”
“We’re leveraging Nvidia’s technology, but we’re also working with public cloud providers and a diverse ecosystem of LLM partners,” he added.
The road ahead
Europe’s AI infrastructure push is unfolding at scale. With telcos like Swisscom launching sovereign DGX SuperPODs, Telefónica piloting edge‑based AI fabrics in Spain, and Telenor expanding green‑powered centres in Norway, the continent is clearly doubling down on sovereign compute.
Yet questions remain: Can these public–private efforts outpace US mega cloud investments? Will these compute centres deliver the promised returns in engineering, healthcare and public services? And crucially, can Europe align policy, talent and infrastructure to sustain a truly sovereign AI ecosystem?
For now, Nvidia has moved into execution mode—building critical infrastructure with top-tier telco partners and European AI-focused cloud players. The race is no longer just about technology leadership, but about shaping the rules, setting the standards, and securing the sovereignty of AI for the next decade.
