Cast off the shackles and be bolder, or risk losing the AI race for good.
That’s the pointed message Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has delivered to European leaders during his trip to the continent over the past week.
Over the last seven days, Huang has visited France, Sweden, the UK, and Germany ahead of Nvidia’s GTC event in Berlin, which began Tuesday.
During that time, he’s been clear that he believes the continent needs to move faster on artificial intelligence and rely less heavily on regulating the sector.
Huang made the case most directly on Monday evening in Berlin, during a public conversation with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
Asked how Europe should regulate AI, Huang said safety had to be paramount, but cautioned that policymakers could not regulate their way to technological leadership.
“There’s nothing to regulate if the industry doesn’t thrive,” Huang told Merz, arguing that Germany needed to foster a domestic AI industry while ensuring it developed safely and responsibly.
He said that policymakers should focus on regulating AI applications, similar to the way they regulate products that use the internet, rather than trying to regulate the underlying technology wholesale.
“We should be regulating the applications right away,” Huang said.
Merz replied that Europe was still trying to find the balance between innovation and regulation. The German leader said he did not believe “no regulation” was the right answer, but that overly tight rules were not either.
Huang’s response: “Give Germany a chance. Give this industry a chance.”
The exchange came as Huang and Merz pitched AI as a potential answer to the economic malaise that led Germany into recessions in 2023 and 2024.
Huang said the country’s manufacturing sector, engineering expertise, and industrial know-how are national resources, and that AI could help its companies turn them into an advantage in the next phase of the technology race.
“The next wave of AI is physical,” Huang said, referring to robotics, manufacturing, cars, and heavy industry. “Electrons will never replace atoms.”
It was the same urgent message Huang had delivered in London days earlier. Speaking to reporters last week, Huang said there was a “strange general behavior” going on in the UK.
He took a swipe at what he described as Britain’s tendency to dwell on failure.
“You have smart people, you have a great culture, you have young people, and the energy is vibrant. But for some reason, if there was a million reasons to win, you find the one reason not to do it.”
“I think you overthink things,” he added.
The remarks underscore a familiar tension in Europe’s approach to AI. The continent has moved early to establish sweeping rules for the technology, including the EU AI Act, while the US and China have pulled ahead in developing frontier models and the infrastructure needed to train them.
Huang, whose company dominates the market for the advanced chips powering the AI boom, is hardly a neutral observer. Nvidia stands to benefit enormously if governments and companies move faster to build AI infrastructure and deploy its technology.
Regardless of his stake in Europe’s AI success, Huang’s message was blunt. If the continent spends too long debating how to regulate AI, it may find that the meaningful innovation is done elsewhere.
