Nvidia to invest in four French startups, makes $250M UK compute donation

Nvidia is putting money into four French startups while also promising a $250 million compute donation for UK AI safety and research. The move is meant to show the chipmaker is serious about Europe, not just selling to it.

The French names are Doctolib, Entalpic, Genesis AI and Pigment. Nvidia did not say how much it is investing in each company, and Les Echos reported the stakes are minority ones. Genesis AI said it was excited to have Nvidia as a strategic investor.

The timing matters. This comes only weeks after Nvidia agreed to buy France-founded AI platform Hugging Face in a deal valued at about $12.9 billion, one of its biggest acquisitions. Jensen Huang, in France as part of a European tour, said the new investments were meant to “kickstart the artificial intelligence revolution in Europe.”

Nvidia has already backed French startups before, including Alice&Bob, Gradium and Scintil Photonics. So this is not a one-off press release stunt. It looks more like a steady attempt to plant flags across the continent, from healthtech to robotics to enterprise software.

The UK side is structured differently. Nvidia says the $250 million commitment will be spread over five years to support agentic safety and security research, and a slice of it will go to SOFAIR at UCL, BOLD at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London.