Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced at GTC Paris that the company is building the world’s first industrial AI cloud in Europe. Manufacturers from the region are expected to take advantage of its capabilities for design, engineering, planning, simulation, robotics, and many other applications. According to the AI chip maker, companies like BMW, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz, and Schaeffler use applications from Ansys, Cadence, and Siemens, all of which can be powered by Nvidia's hardware.
“In the era of AI, every manufacturer needs two factories: one for making things, and one for creating the intelligence that powers them,” Huang said at the GTC Paris Keynote. “By building Europe’s first industrial AI infrastructure, we’re enabling the region’s leading industrial companies to advance simulation-first, AI-driven manufacturing.”
The company is going to build this facility in Germany, and it will have 10,000 GPUs — combining Nvidia DGX B200 systems and RTX PRO Servers — and will run CUDA-X libraries, and RTX and Omniverse-accelerated workloads used by leading software developers. Nvidia says that this industrial AI cloud “will serve as a launchpad to accelerate AI development and adoption for European manufacturers in anticipation of AI gigafactories.” It isn’t clear who is funding this project, but the European Commission has previously announced plans to invest $20 billion in AI infrastructure.
Aside from this industrial AI cloud, Nvidia also said that it’s releasing new tools that will make it easier to build "AI factories"—large-scale compute installations like this one—both on-site and in the cloud, which will allow governments and organizations to create their own sovereign AI agents. These AI agents are crucial for highly sensitive and regulated industries, like finance, healthcare, and governance, as they are tailored to regional culture, understand the local language, and are far more secure than AI tools built by others.
The company says many European organizations are already building AI factories using Nvidia technologies. These include the French multinational banking and financial services company BNP Paribas and the German financial IT service provider Finanz Informatik. Even beauty brand L’Oreal is backing a startup that has partnered with Accenture and is using its AI Refinery platform to develop the AI Beauty Matchmaker.
Nvidia’s push to build AI factories will make it easier for companies to develop and use AI tools that are specifically tailored for their needs. It seems that the Germany-based industrial AI cloud facility is being built to serve the infrastructure needs of this effort, especially for institutions that cannot afford to buy hardware. Aside from that, Nvidia also launched the DGX Cloud Lepton marketplace, which makes it easier for smaller companies to rent computing power for their AI factory needs, allowing them to easily pick and choose providers on one single platform.
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