Nvidia's Jensen Huang tells Europe: produce AI, don't just consume it

Jensen Huang stood inside Berlin's Tempodrom — a circus-tent venue bathed in gamer-den lighting — and told 4,000 people that Europe's role in the AI era is not yet written, and that Nvidia intends to write it with them. The Nvidia chief executive's keynote at the company's GTC conference on October 21, 2026, was equal parts product launch and industrial manifesto, built around a single argument: Europe must stop merely consuming artificial intelligence and start producing it.

To be part of this AI economy, you don't want to just be consuming the AI. You want to be producing the AI. We can do all of that here in Europe.— Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia

Huang dismissed concerns that Europe has fallen too far behind the United States and China to matter in AI, insisting that 'Europe's AI economy is starting, and it's really accelerating,' according to dpa-international. He framed the moment as 'the beginnings of a new industrial revolution,' one in which companies no longer simply run software but operate what he called 'AI factories' — systems that produce digital intelligence to be embedded across every sector, from drug development to energy distribution.

Every company in Europe will become an AI company.— Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia

The centerpiece hardware announcement was the DSX Pod, a modular 'AI factory' that Huang described as plug-and-play: a large metal container packed with Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin compute racks, arriving fully assembled and capable of going online in 14 days rather than the months or years a conventional data center build requires. According to Wired, Huang argued the speed advantage is particularly valuable in Europe, where infrastructure projects are notoriously slow, and that the faster deployment would also cut the time compute sits idle.

This is a complete transformation.— Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia

Alongside the DSX Pod, Nvidia unveiled RTX Spark, a line of specialized desktop computers designed to run complex AI tasks on-site without relying on external data centers, according to dpa-international — a move aimed at making the technology accessible to businesses and developers who cannot or will not route sensitive workloads through the cloud.

The keynote's second major theme was physical AI — systems that understand and act in the real world. Huang called humanoid robotics 'the next great industry' and argued Europe's manufacturing heritage positions it well to lead. But he cast physical AI more broadly: telecom operators, he noted, are already adding Nvidia GPUs to cell towers. He announced a full-stack robotics platform designed to standardize configuration across the industry, and said Nvidia plans to release a preconfigured reference robot called Agile One in the first quarter of next year to give developers a starting point.

That's really the next wave of AI, AI that understands the physical world.— Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia

Partnerships with European industrial names gave the pitch concrete weight. Huang announced collaborations with Volkswagen and Mercedes on autonomous vehicles, according to Wired.

On software, Huang predicted that every company will eventually run both closed and customized open-source models, showcasing Nvidia's own open-source models as capable of reaching frontier performance when trained on an organization's proprietary data. He also argued that AI agents — digital assistants that reason, iterate, and use tools — will expand the total number of software users and drive token consumption, and therefore demand for Nvidia GPUs, steadily higher. Nvidia also unveiled new security concepts to ensure agents operate within strict guidelines and cannot access sensitive company data without authorization, according to dpa-international.

Nvidia said it invested nearly $10 billion in the European market last year alone to support a network of start-ups and established companies, according to dpa-international. The Berlin GTC follows the last GTC held in San Jose, California, in March, which focused on AI inference and more efficient compute; the Berlin edition shifted focus to power, agents, and physical AI, according to Wired.

The event was not without friction. At one point, two Greenpeace protesters stood up and unfurled a banner reading 'Clean up your dirty business.' Huang told his security team to 'Go easy' as they were escorted out, according to Wired. The 90-minute keynote ended with an AI-generated Eurovision song summarizing the announcements — and, according to Wired, some small Microduck robots made by recent Nvidia acquisition Hugging Face doing Huang's bidding onstage.

This is your great opportunity.— Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia

Why it matters — Nvidia's Berlin keynote signals a direct push to make Europe a manufacturing hub for AI infrastructure and physical AI systems, with billions in investment and major industrial partnerships that could shape how quickly European companies — and their workforces — are reshaped by the technology.

Reported by bloomberg.com, moneycontrol.com, wired.com, dpa-international.com