Nvidia pledges $2B more for its European AI push, including a new stake in France's Doctolib
What's the deal? Jensen Huang said Nvidia will announce $2 billion in new European AI investments within a week, on top of the $8 billion it has poured into the continent over the past year — pushing its total commitment to the region's tech ecosystem to nearly $10 billion. Speaking in Paris on the first stop of a tour that also takes in London and Berlin, the Nvidia CEO named four French startups receiving fresh backing: Doctolib, Genesis AI, Pigment, and Entalpic.
Four bets, four sectors. The picks span very different corners of AI: Genesis AI is building general-purpose robots through foundation models, data-collection systems and simulation infrastructure; Pigment makes enterprise planning software for forecasting and scenario modelling; and Entalpic accelerates materials discovery at the atomic scale, with a focus on semiconductor and electronics manufacturing. All three are Paris-based and considerably earlier-stage than Doctolib.
The Doctolib angle. The highest-profile of the four is the healthcare platform: Nvidia has agreed to buy a minority stake, size and value undisclosed, with Doctolib saying the chipmaker's backing will help it build AI tools. Founded in 2013, Doctolib handles appointment booking and administrative work for doctors and has become a common tool for patients across France, Germany and Italy — one of France's best-known startups. The timing is pointed: Doctolib is also the one name on the list whose valuation has already moved. A secondary sale in April, in which staff and early investors sold roughly €300 million in shares, valued the company at €3.6 billion — a 38% discount to the €5.8 billion it carried after its 2022 funding round.
Why Europe, why now? Huang's pitch is sovereignty: open-source models, he argues, are cheaper to run, easier to adapt to local languages, and the only credible way for the continent to close the AI gap with the US. "Europe needs to get in the race," he said. Mistral AI is the test case Nvidia points to — it trained its Large 4 model on 4,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs inside European data centres and is due to publish the weights on 27 October. The pitch also lands against a live piece of EU policy: Brussels' AI Gigafactories tender, open since July, is offering €10 billion in public backing for up to seven facilities, and Nvidia has already signed letters of intent to supply hardware.
The bigger picture. The sums are modest next to Nvidia itself, worth about $5.7 trillion this month against roughly $700 billion in July for ASML, Europe's most valuable listed company. But the European push is one piece of a much bigger pattern: Nvidia's equity stakes in companies that buy its chips reached $99 billion by July, up from about $7 billion a year earlier, and the company was reported in September to be weighing up to $10 billion as an anchor investor in Anthropic's IPO — more than the entire €3 billion round Mistral AI raised at a valuation above €21 billion, itself the largest any European tech company has raised.
Read more: thenextweb.com, Reuters, Bloomberg, NVIDIA
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
