Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose company develops chips and software for artificial intelligence (AI) developers, spoke at the GTC conference in Berlin before about three thousand developers, analysts and journalists. He called on Europe's AI industry to step up: according to him, Europe's AI economy is "starting to grow and accelerating."
Huang noted that Europe is building its AI economy as the technology shifts from language models to so-called physical AI in manufacturing. "Every company in the future will become an AI company," he said. In his speech he repeatedly mentioned European partners such as Siemens, Mercedes-Benz and Audi (part of Volkswagen).
Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Kallenius, whose company is developing autonomous driving technology together with Nvidia, said the technology could reduce the number of fatal accidents caused by human error "to zero... we will have safer streets when we get full autonomy."
Huang presented the modular Vera Rubin DSK Pod design - a ready-made computing center that is delivered in a container similar to a shipping container. According to him, this will cut data center deployment time from months to days. "This will change the way people build AI centers," he said. He also said that over the past year Nvidia has invested 10 billion dollars in European startups and partners.
Building data centers is critically important for Europe, which has only about 5% of the world's computing capacity for AI compared with 75% in the United States. The shortage of computing resources ("compute" in English) is a key obstacle for European developers. "The main bottleneck is compute," said Jeannette zu Furstenberg, president and managing director of General Catalyst (which invests in AI companies), before the speech.
Huang also addressed security issues, describing the OpenShell and Sentry software, which is intended for external control over the actions of AI applications and for blocking them when they violate corporate rules. During the speech he was briefly interrupted by protesters with a banner calling for his business to be "removed"; Huang promised to "talk later" and asked security not to use force.