Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corp., speaks during a news conference in Taipei on May 21, 2025. Cheng / AFP) (Photo by I-HWA CHENG/AFP via Getty Images)
I-hwa Cheng | Afp | Getty Images
Nvidia on Wednesday announced a slew of partnerships with European countries and companies spanning infrastructure to software as it looks to keep itself at the center of the global artificial intelligence story.
Chief Executive Jensen Huang on Wednesday continued his tour of Europe with a keynote at Nvidia’s GTC event in Paris, France, where he laid out some key European partnerships.
Nvidia has been keen to position itself as an infrastructure company that can help countries and governments build data centers using its graphics processing units to unlock the potential of AI for local economies and populations. As part of that effort, Huang recently carried out a similar whirlwind trip to the Middle East, where Nvidia is planning to sell its latest chips as part of big data center buildouts in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“Every industrial revolution begins with infrastructure. AI is the essential infrastructure of our time, just as electricity and the internet once were,” Huang said in a Wednesday press release.
“Europe has now awakened to the importance of these AI factories, the importance of this AI infrastructure,” Huang said during a separate presentation on Wednesday. AI factories is the term Nvidia uses for massive data centers containing its GPUs.
Huang added that AI computing capacity in Europe will grow by a factor of 10 in the next two years.
The tech giant seeks to expand its international footprint and embed itself in national level AI infrastructure. That push into new markets is even more critical as U.S. export restrictions on Nvidia’s most advanced chips have lost the company revenue in China.
Nvidia said it is working with country governments, regional cloud and telecommunications firms and technology centers in Europe.
One of the key partnerships announced is between Nvidia and French startup Mistral, which will build an “AI cloud” that will deploy 18,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips. This will allow businesses to develop and use AI through Mistral’s models, Nvidia said.
Nvidia also announced infrastructure projects in Italy and Armenia.
Orange and Telefonica are among the telecommunications companies also working with Nvidia in areas such as deploying AI applications and large language models as part of the newly announced deals.
In Germany, Nvidia said it is building what it has dubbed as an “industrial cloud” that will feature 10,000 GPUs and will be specifically designed to provide services for European manufacturers.
The big focus from Nvidia in Europe is around so-called “sovereign AI,” the idea that data centers and servers that are providing services to users in the European Union, are actually located regionally rather than abroad.
Nvidia also announced so-called “tech centers” in Europe, which will focus on advanced research, upskilling workforces and accelerating scientific breakthroughs in countries including the U.K., France, Spain and Germany.
Nvidia also expanded a product called DGX Cloud Lepton — something of a marketplace for GPUs — with new cloud providers and integrated it with AI model repository Hugging Face. DGX Cloud Lepton works by allowing developers to access GPUs across the world to run AI applications.
Software push
While Nvidia is best-known for its hardware — its infamous GPUs — the technology giant has ramped up its focus on its software offering to help keep the company at the center of fast-moving AI development.
That software push has continued into Europe.
Last year, Nvidia announced a product called Nvidia NIM, which is effectively a pre-packaged AI model that can be quickly deployed and that lets developers build apps on it. Nvidia on Wednesday announced any large language model available on Hugging Face can also be deployed as NIM.
Rather than creating their own models, developers can easily access these options via Nvidia’s NIM service.
Nvidia’s strategy is to link its hardware to all of this software, giving it an edge over rivals in a bid to cement its dominance so far in AI.
The co-founder and CEO of sales and customer service management software company Salesforce is well aware that investors are betting big on Palantir, which offers data management software to businesses and government agencies.
“Oh my gosh. I am so inspired by that company,” Benioff told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in a Tuesday interview at Goldman Sachs‘ Communacopia+Technology conference in San Francisco. “I mean, not just because they have 100 times, you know, multiple on their revenue, which I would love to have that too. Maybe it’ll have 1000 times on their revenue soon.”
Salesforce, a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, remains 10 times larger than Palantir by revenue, with over $10 billion in revenue during the latest quarter. But Palantir is growing 48%, compared with 10% for Salesforce.
Benioff added that Palantir’s prices are “the most expensive enterprise software I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe I’m not charging enough,” he said.
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It wasn’t Benioff’s first time talking about Palantir. Last week, Benioff referenced Palantir’s “extraordinary” prices in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, saying Salesforce offers a “very competitive product at a much lower cost.”
The next day, TBPN podcast hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays asked for a response from Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and CEO.
“We are very focused on value creation, and we ask to be modestly compensated for that value,” Karp said.
The companies sometimes compete for government deals, and Benioff touted a recent win over Palantir for a U.S. Army contract.
Palantir started in 2003, four years after Salesforce. But while Salesforce went public in 2004, Palantir arrived on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.
Palantir’s market capitalization stands at $406 billion, while Salesforce is worth $231 billion. And as one of the most frequently traded stocks on Robinhood, Palantir is popular with retail investors.
Salesforce shares are down 27% this year, the worst performance in large-cap tech.
Gemini Co-founders Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss attend the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City, U.S., Sept. 12, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
Shares of Gemini Space Station soared more than 40% on Thursday after the exchange operator raised $425 million in an initial public offering.
The stock opened at $37.01 on the Nasdaq after its IPO priced at $28. At one point, shares traded as high as $40.71.
The New York-based company priced its IPO late Thursday above this week’s expected range of $24 to $26, and an initial range of between $17 and $19. That valued the company at some $3.3 billion before trading began.
Gemini, which primarily operates as a cryptocurrency exchange, was founded by the Winklevoss brothers in 2014 and held more than $21 billion of assets on its platform as of the end of July. Per its registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gemini posted a net loss of $159 million in 2024, and in the first half of this year, it lost $283 million.
The company also offers a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, credit cards with a crypto-back rewards program and a custody service for institutions.
The Winklevoss brothers were among the earliest bitcoin investors and first bitcoin billionaires. They have long held that bitcoin is a superior store of value than gold. On Friday morning, they told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” they see its price reaching $1 million a decade from now.
In 2013, they were the first to apply to launch a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, more than 10 years before the first bitcoin ETFs would eventually be approved. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s rejection of the application, which cited risk of fraud and market manipulation, set the stage for the bitcoin ETF debate in the years to come.
Even in the early days, when bitcoin was notorious for its extreme volatility and anti-establishment roots and shunned by Wall Street, the Winklevoss brothers were outspoken about the need for smart regulation that would establish rules for the crypto-led financial revolution.
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Opendoor co-founder and newly minted board chair Keith Rabois said remote work and a “bloated” workforce have been a drag on the company’s culture, as he vowed to slash headcount.
“There’s 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t need more than 200 of them,” Rabois told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday.
The online real-estate platform on Wednesday appointed former Shopify executive Kaz Nejatian as its new CEO after investor pressure caused his predecessor, Carrie Wheeler, to resign last month. Opendoor also named Rabois as chairman and said Eric Wu, who served as the company’s first CEO before stepping down in 2023, would return to the board.
The announcement sent Opendoor shares soaring 78% on Thursday, before the stock slid more than 12% on Friday. It is still up almost 500% this year, after an army of retail investors pushed up the stock price when hedge fund manager Eric Jackson began touting the company.
Stock Chart IconStock chart icon
Opendoor year-to-date stock chart.
Opendoor’s business involves using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains.
Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson bought shares of Opendoor in July. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.
Rabois said he has a “high level view of the strategy” that’s needed to transform Opendoor, and that the headcount reductions are necessary to resolve the company’s cash burn.
“The culture was broken,” Rabois said. “These people were working remotely. That doesn’t work. This company was founded on the principle of innovation and working together in person. We’re going to return to our roots.”
He added that Opendoor “went down this DEI path,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion.