Perhaps dazzled by the complimentary wine, various voices on social media have been hailing Nvidia’s Euro-Jensen tour as some kind of seminal moment for UK/ French/German (pick your favoured country) tech. There have been (click each one) several breathless moments, captured on the steps of a plush London hotel and in other European offices.
But I hate to break this to you: all of them fit very conveniently into Nvidia’s wider strategy.
This is not a moment of ‘noblesse oblige’ from the AI chip giant, and anyone saying so needs to remind themselves what coffee smells like.
Here are the facts: Nvidia did not disclose the size of any of the five UK investments (four actually, one a US-based company). Astronomical amounts were circulating on Wednesday, but nothing has been confirmed by the company, so take it all with a large pinch of salt.
Plus, there’s a clear trail of some investments leading to a whiff of alignment with UK government policy. I mean, Jensen is even investing in Prince William’s Earthshot prize. How aligned with the UK state could you get?
Plus, increasingly, Nvidia’s UK investments seem to be overlapping with the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund. How convenient.
This is, to steal from Private Eye magazine, is a ‘trebles all round’ moment. The UK government gets third-party, external validation of its investment picks. Nvidia gets its architecture embedded into the companies the British state is now deeply committed, with tax-payer money, to help scale.
Prima Mente is one of the first cohort of the UK's £500m Sovereign AI Fund, as is Ineffable Intelligence, which Nvidia already counts in its UK portfolio, and which recently announced a collaboration with Nvidia on reinforcement learning infrastructure.
Riverlane also fits Nvidia’s strategy. It wants its GPUs to be inside the quantum computing stack. Riverlane's work accelerating decoder recalibration with GPUs is exactly that. Hiverge's engine optimises algorithms for, among other things, faster AI training. Boltz and Prima Mente are in AI training in biology. What do you need for training AI? Nvidia’s GPUs!
Furthermore, as the US remains committed to locking China out of high-end chips, Nvidia must (for the love of God) seed growth for its products outside that country. Hence the love-bombing of European tech companies and governments. It did 14 European funding rounds in 2025, double that of 2024. With Paris, London and Berlin next on this year’s tour, where the total lands by the end of this year.
Let us also remember that the $250m donated in compute to various UK institutions is a donation, not cash. That will buy it goodwill with the UK government that hosts the AI Security Institute, which could end up playing a big part in the global conversation about AI safety.
But let’s not be too cynical. Who of us will criticise Jensen, if he ends up buying humanity longer odds than 10% survival? Not us.