- Nvidia plans minority stakes in four French startups; it has not disclosed any amounts.
- Jensen Huang said Nvidia will announce $2B more in European deals within a week of October 13.
- EU-based AI firms drew $15.8B in venture capital in 2025, 6% of the global AI total.
Nvidia has told Europe how much it plans to spend before saying what it has already spent. In Paris on October 13, 2026, chief executive Jensen Huang said the chipmaker will announce $2 billion in new European AI deals within a week of the event, on top of the $8 billion he says it put into the continent over the past year.
The first names are four French startups: healthcare platform Doctolib, robotics developer Genesis AI, planning-software maker Pigment and materials-discovery startup Entalpic.
Nvidia describes them as planned investments and puts its European commitment at nearly $10 billion, without splitting equity from infrastructure.
Meet the four French startups
Doctolib, founded in 2013 by Stanislas Niox-Chateau, says 100 million patients and 580,000 health professionals now use its services. It has used Nvidia technology for a year. The investment will pay for AI hiring and give it access to Nvidia’s experts to train models in Europe, according to the company’s release.
Genesis AI, based in Paris and Palo Alto, emerged from stealth in July 2025 with a $105 million seed round co-led by Eclipse Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Its founders are Zhou Xian, a Carnegie Mellon robotics PhD, and Théophile Gervet, a former Mistral researcher. Bloomberg reported on July 23, 2026, that it was in talks to raise about $500 million at a $3 billion pre-money valuation, with Premji Invest expected to lead. Genesis has not confirmed that. Rival Generalist, founded by ex-DeepMind researchers, reached a $3 billion valuation on $200 million.
Pigment, the Paris planning platform founded in 2019 by Eléonore Crespo and Criteo co-founder Romain Niccoli, raised a $145 million Series D in April 2024, led by ICONIQ Growth. Its customers include Unilever, Merck and Klarna, according to that announcement. Nvidia says Pigment helps companies forecast and model scenarios across finance, sales, workforce and operations.
Entalpic was founded in 2024 by Mathieu Galtier, an Owkin alumnus, with Mila researchers Victor Schmidt and Alexandre Duval. It raised an €8.5 million seed round in September 2024 from Breega, Cathay Innovation and Felicis. Nvidia says it works on advanced materials at the atomic scale, with expertise in semiconductor manufacturing and next-generation electronics. TFN covered Cathay’s$1 billion AI fund, where Entalpic is an early portfolio company.
Sovereign AI on Nvidia silicon
Huang’s pitch is that open-weight models, which anyone can download and adapt, can help Europe close the gap with US labs. Nvidia already backs Mistral, which raised a €3 billion Series D at a valuation above €21 billion on September 8, 2026. Samsung Electronics led it, and Nvidia took part.
Doctolib shows the tension. Its release says it will build on open models and keep health data in the EU and the UK under its sole control. AFP reported that its models will run on Nvidia chips, so it does not have to rely on OpenAI or Anthropic.
The data and the models stay European, but the hardware does not. Counterpoint Research found that 92% of sovereign large language models across more than 80 countries outside the US and China use Nvidia chips. A Forrester analyst argues, as reported by Clubic, that such stakes keep partners’ tools tuned to Nvidia’s architecture and make a later switch to AMD costlier. Each startup Nvidia funds is also a customer for its chips.
In London, Nvidia also made a compute donation valued at $250 million over five years to UK AI safety and security research
The $15.8B gap
The money gap is wide. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says AI companies took $258.7 billion, or 61%, of global venture capital in 2025. US-based AI firms drew about $194 billion of it, or 75%, roughly 12 times the $15.8 billion, or 6%, that went to EU-based firms. France’s finance ministry said in June that it had raised another €13 billion in institutional capital for the tech sector.
None of the four stakes has a price, so the size of Nvidia’s cheques is the first thing to look for. The second is whether European startups can build on Nvidia’s chips without handing it the economics.
