NVIDIA is the US chipmaker whose GPUs underpin most of the AI infrastructure tracked here. Through 2026 it deepened its European push, with a Physical AI Living Lab with Nebius for robotics startups and CEO Jensen Huang's GTC Paris keynote at VivaTech advancing an agenda of 20+ AI factories across Europe, agentic AI and physical AI. Its hardware anchors European sovereign-compute buildouts even as those buildouts aim to reduce dependence on US-controlled infrastructure. In the first week of September 2026 it moved from supplier to owner: a confirmed $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, an equity stake in Mistral AI's EUR 3 billion round, and strategic investor status in the EUR 108 million Series B of Valencia photonics spinout iPronics.
On 12 September Reuters reported it was in talks to put up to $10bn into Anthropic's IPO as anchor investor, a listing seeking as much as $100bn. That leaves NVIDIA owning Hugging Face, which has volunteered to audit the frontier labs, while negotiating to become one of the largest shareholders in one of them.
Between 13 and 15 October 2026 it took minority stakes in nine French and British startups, among them Doctolib, Pigment, and Riverlane, and pledged $250 million of compute over five years to UK agentic AI safety research.
On 19 October 2026 Germany's research ministry signed a letter of intent with NVIDIA at the Invest in Germany summit in Berlin to make industrial data usable with its Nemotron and Cosmos models, with no investment amount disclosed.
On 21 October 2026 Mistral AI announced it would pair its models and physics pipelines with NVIDIA's simulation software for aerospace, car, and chip design, with public benchmarks promised.