Germany plans broad Nvidia AI partnership with Siemens, Audi and 12 firms
Germany's federal government plans to announce a wide-ranging AI cooperation agreement with Nvidia next week at the Invest in Germany summit in Berlin, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expected to present it on Monday, Handelsblatt reported, citing sources (Nvidia confirmed Huang will be in the city; the government has not commented). The deal reportedly involves several hundred million euros, possibly drawn from a research fund, with most of the money paying for computing power on Deutsche Telekom's AI cloud while Nvidia supplies chips and engineers; about a dozen German companies are said to want to take part, including Siemens, Audi and image-generation startup Black Forest Labs. The stated goals are to lay the groundwork for physical AI used to train robots and self-driving cars, and to build high-performance industrial AI models, building on the SOOFI (Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models) effort.
If completed, it would be a large state-funded push for European sovereign AI built on US hardware, and another sign that governments are becoming a core Nvidia customer segment.