Nvidia (NVDA.US) increases European AI layout and joins hands with French Mistral to expand footprint

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Nvidia (NVDA.US) has announced a series of projects aimed at strengthening European artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, including expanding cooperation with French startup Mistral AI.

Nvidia CEO Hwang In-hoon announced the news at the Nvidia-VivaTech joint event in Paris. He said Europe needs to build data centers to help countries deploy artificial intelligence technology.

The chipmaker is trying to expand the market for artificial intelligence accelerators. Nvidia is driving countries to deploy the technology at the national level and is trying to make it easier for individual companies to benefit from artificial intelligence.

In France, Nvidia will partner with Mistral to use local artificial intelligence computing to run the startup's services. A service called Mistral Compute will use Nvidia's 18,000 new Grace Blackwell chips. The service will be developed at Mistral's data center in Essonne, France, and the company plans to roll it out to the rest of Europe.

In the UK, artificial intelligence companies Nebius Group and Nscale Global Holdings Ltd. will use “thousands” of such semiconductors on their respective platforms. Other countries, including Italy and Armenia, are also installing new hardware, Nvidia said.

In Europe, Nvidia is working with 1.5 million developers, 9,600 businesses, and 7,000 startups.

“The only thing missing is infrastructure,” Dion Harris, head of data centers and high-performance computing at Nvidia, said during a briefing before the press conference. He also said that Nvidia is collaborating with cloud computing and telecommunications companies across Europe.

Europe lags behind the US in developing artificial intelligence infrastructure, and is not up to the level of spending promised by other regions. On Monday, Wong In-hoon said at an event with British Prime Minister Kiel Stammer that the lack of infrastructure has hindered the growth of the UK, and that the UK originally had the expertise and startups to become global rivals of artificial intelligence.

Hwang In-hoon said at the GTC-VivaTech conference that in the next two years, more than 20 so-called “artificial intelligence factories” will be planned and built across Europe, “several” of which will be “gigafactories.” These larger factories will house more than 100,000 chips. It is estimated that European artificial intelligence hardware production capacity will triple next year.

“We will increase Europe's artificial intelligence computing capacity by 10 times,” he said.

According to information, giants including Microsoft and Meta Platforms Inc. contributed about half of Nvidia's sales. The chipmaker wants to expand the market by driving businesses and countries to use smaller systems.

Amazon's AWS, Mistral, and others will join the chipmaker's Lepton service, which helps AI developers connect with the computing hardware they need, Nvidia said.

Nvidia said European countries need help deploying artificial intelligence models based on local language and data. The company is providing software and services to accelerate these efforts.

Also, Nvidia said that cars equipped with its chips and software are already on the road. Mercedes-Benz Group CLA models and upcoming Volvo and Jaguar models will all be equipped with its Drive platform.