Nvidia commits French startup investments and UK AI safety compute donation

Nvidia is making new investments in four French startups, as well as providing computer access for United Kingdom safety research. This move comes as the company visits Europe to underscore its commitment to the regional tech ecosystem. CEO Jensen Huang said the steps are intended to kickstart the artificial intelligence revolution in Europe.

The French investments include healthtech firm Doctolib, AI startup Entalpic, robotics maker Genesis AI and enterprise software company Pigment. These deals follow a recent agreement to buy France-founded platform Hugging Face for about $12.9bn. Genesis AI said it was excited that Nvidia is a strategic investor in the company.

The donation to United Kingdom research is valued at $250m over five years, delivered as compute access rather than cash. This works out at $50m of computer power each year, hosted within Britain and distributed through local partners. Provider selection and commercial terms have still to be agreed by the company.

A portion of the commitment will support SOFAIR at UCL, BOLD at University of Oxford, and Imperial College London. These institutions will work on safety engineering and robotics as part of the agreement. The research focuses on secure agents, open-model security and threat mitigation using Nvidia technology.

American science received four times as much in a similar five-year commitment announced five days earlier. That pledge included $1B for United States universities and government cloud providers. In June, AMD pledged up to £2B over five years while Nvidia pledged nothing at that time.

Ministers welcomed the support as a vote of confidence in British research and the country's G20 presidency. It remains unclear whether this $250m counts towards the $2B of European investments Huang said would be announced within a week. Nvidia has not published a breakdown of the total amount put into Europe over the past year.