Nvidia's 'Sovereign' AI can win a prize for irony | Mint

(Bloomberg Opinion) – Nvidia Corp. -billionaire -boss Jensen Huang, dressed in his signature leather jacket, crossed the European capitals and parted the stage with Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, while “sovereign” on the national intelligence, a vision of new data firms, rather than via the dominant technical firefighters. But if there were prizes for irony, this is a concept that can win some. Huang’s pitch has understandably struck an agreement with leaders desperate for new sources of productivity profit and for ways to prevent them from finally being left behind in a US and China technical race. Recent announcements include a partnership with the French Ai-Startart Mistral to build a cloud platform with 18,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips and an industrial cloud in Germany for European manufacturing built with 10,000 Blackwell discs. It’s not just Europe – Nvidia has cut a large sovereign AI transactions in the Middle East – but the old continent is where Huang sees that the computer ability by a factor of 10 increases in the next two years. “It’s coming,” he said. However, you may be interested in it, however, does not look much like sovereignty. From the point of view of Nvidia, the company certainly positions itself as a geopolitical actor, and works directly with the heads of state such as Macron as the Ultimate Tech enabler to promote AI adoption. It is good for Nvidia amid a broader Sino-American trade war that has seen it lose $ 15 billion to Chinese sales as a result of export control, and as Europeans become warned by US technical suppliers such as Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Bloomberg Intelligence, over the past month, has been able to add an annual revenue of $ 10 to $ 15 billion for Nvidia in a de-globalizing world. But from Europe’s point of view, we are still far from the leaders of technical autonomy as Macron wants to offer anxious voters. The hardware and infrastructure that uses these major AI projects is ultimately NVIDIAs, an American company with 80% market share whose dominance will be hedged by slides that are updated or replaced every few years. To the extent that there is a European supply chain, it exists elsewhere in the Brainy Engineers and Open Source models offered by Mistral. But it still has to be seen whether it will be sufficient to ensure Europe’s AI future when US opponents are so dominant. Mistral’s € 1 billion ($ 1.2 billion) to capital raised so far is a rupture compared to Openai’s; And as ambitious as its plans are, Europe today has only 4.8% of the estimated global AI calculation power, according to Epoch AI. We’ve seen this film before. France and Germany once stabbed their hope to a sovereign cloud to protect user data from the extraordinary scope of the US and China. US technical enterprises are still about 70% of cloud services in Europe today. And for every attempt to reduce dependence, such as the Danish municipalities that Microsoft ceases, there is an opposite step like the German army’s cloud agreement with Google. Looking for European instruments that were promoted as alternatives to Google, rather relied on Microsoft’s Bing – so when Bing went off during the global interruption of last year, they did. Is it a wonder that Microsoft now offers ‘Sovereign Cloud’ services to Europe without a hint of irony? Some people and fuzzy language set aside, some will argue that it doesn’t matter if Huang’s vision of AI pays as an essential technology such as electricity or the steam engine. During the research and the AI ​​summit of last week, a panel I moderated compared AI sovereignty with a national airline: The flags and surgeries are the score, not the origin of the aluminum tube and its engines. But there were tangible costs not to get enough of dependencies – such as Russian natural gas or Chinese exports – and AI can be the same, according to the researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Leevi Saari. With technology still driven a lot by globalized supply chains, outsourced labor and dominant sellers, what is offered today seems more like ‘sovereignty-as-a-service’-the casing of autonomy at high cost. After all, it is perhaps the existence of alternatives such as Airbus’s that make airlines so relaxed. If AI sovereignty is a worthy goal, Europe will have to do more than come up with new cover for the same chips. It has advantages: talent, skills, companies such as Asml Holding NV and a car-industrial basis that is ripe for innovation. But what it is not lacking is an ecosystem with an abundant research spending, financing and the demand for the end user-the kind that helped us increase more than double the financing of their European counterparts last year, according to AVP. It will not be changed within a day, but it must be part of any sovereign vision – just like investing in the independence of the chip to ensure ‘good enough’ alternatives and diversify the risk, according to Nathan Benach of Air Street Capital. The alternative, he believes, is digital colonialism. As China runs its way to the in -depth path and the US embraces its hemisphere, he expects Huang’s leather jacket to see more often. More from Bloomberg opinion: This column reflects the author’s personal views and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial or Bloomberg MP and his owners. Lionel Laurent is a columnist from Bloomberg who writes about the future of money and the future of Europe. Previously, he was a reporter for Reuters and Forbes. More stories like these are available on Bloomberg.com/opinion © 2025 Bloomberg LP