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.