Nvidia CEO warned that while AI will be a great equalizer, Europe risks falling behind in AI infrastructure competition without major investment.
Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO and global chip tycoon, took the stage at VivaTech in Paris on June 12, 2025, to present artificial intelligence not as a force of dystopian risk or technological dominance, but as "the greatest equaliser of people the world has ever created." Wearing his signature biker jacket, Huang positioned AI as a tool for liberation rather than control, framing it against concerns that the technology might either lift the world's poorest or tighten the grip of a tech elite.
Beyond the optics, Nvidia used the Paris summit to announce a dramatic expansion of its physical and strategic footprint across Europe. In France, the company is deploying 18,000 of its new Blackwell chips with startup Mistral AI. In Germany, it is building an industrial AI cloud to support manufacturers, with similar rollouts underway in Italy, Spain, Finland, and the U.K., including a new AI lab in Britain. Additional announcements included a partnership with AI startup Perplexity to bring sovereign AI models to European publishers and telecoms, a new cloud platform with Mistral AI, and work with BMW and Mercedes-Benz to train AI-powered robots for use in auto plants.
Central to Huang's pitch is his concept of the "AI factory"—not a plant that makes goods, but a vast data center that creates intelligence, training language models, simulating new drugs, and detecting cancer in scans. When asked if such systems risk creating a "technological priesthood" that hoards computing power and stymies bottom-up innovation, Huang pushed back, telling The Associated Press: "Through the velocity of our innovation, we democratise. We lower the cost of access to technology." He cast these factories as systems that "reason," "plan," and "spend a lot of time talking to" themselves, powering everything from ChatGPT to autonomous vehicles and diagnostics.
Huang framed AI infrastructure as a matter of national priority, stating that "Just as electricity powered the last industrial revolution, AI will power the next one" and "Every country now needs a national intelligence infrastructure." His vision of "sovereign AI" emphasizes autonomy and local alignment rather than isolation: "The data belongs to you. It belongs to your people, your country... your culture, your history, your common sense." On concerns that AI could escape human control, Huang offered a technological answer: "In the future, the AI that is doing the task is going to be surrounded by 70 or 80 other AIs that are supervising it, observing it, guarding it, ensuring that it doesn't go off the rails."
The Paris event was part of Huang's broader European tour, which included London Tech Week and is scheduled to include Germany. In Paris, he appeared alongside French President Emmanuel Macron and Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch to reinforce the message that AI is now a national priority. His tour arrives as Europe faces a crossroads between its world-first AI regulations and the risk of falling behind the U.S. and China in the global AI race.