Germany eyeing ‘Nvidia deal backed by hundreds of millions of euros in public spending’

The German government is planning to announce a collaborative deal with Nvidia, the German newspaper Handelsblatt has reported.

Citing people familiar with the deal, the publication reported that the German government is set to invest up to a three-figure million-euro sum in a deal that would see Nvidia support the German AI ecosystem.

The project is expected to target physical AI such as robotics and autonomous machines, as well as ‘AI factories’ a term used to describe massive compute clusters used for AI training and inference, Handelsblatt said.

It added that almost a dozen German firms are also lining up to take part in the deal including Audi, Siemens and the German AI developer Black Forest Labs.

Handelsblatt said the deal will be announced at the Invest in Germany conference, due to be held in Berlin on 19 and 20 October.

Nvidia has become an integral organisation to the AI ecosystem, as the world’s largest developer of specialised AI chips.

This would be the latest in a string of national commitments Nvidia has made.

In May, Nvidia pledged to invest $150 billion per year in Taiwan, where its chips are produced.

On 13 October, Nvidia committed to a five-year compute supply deal for the UK worth $250 million. Computing resources worth $50 million will be made in the first year, to academic organisations including the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab (BOLD), Imperial College London’s AI research efforts and UCL’s Science of Fundamental AI Research Lab (SOFAIR).