Large investment of millions: Federal government is considering AI partnership with Nvidia

In the future, robots and autonomous vehicles will increasingly be trained with AI in Germany. The federal government wants to work closely with the chip giant Nvidia and invest heavily.

According to a media report, the federal government wants to enter into a partnership with the US chip company Nvidia in order to help artificial intelligence (AI) achieve a breakthrough in the industry. Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Nvidia boss Jensen Huang planned to announce the cooperation on Monday at the “Invest in Germany” investment summit in Berlin, the “Handelsblatt” reported, citing government and industry circles. The federal government is prepared to invest a three-digit million amount in the project. The federal government has not yet commented on the possible partnership.

The initiative is intended to lay the foundation for the use of so-called physical AI, which is needed, for example, for training robots and autonomous vehicles, the report continued. The government start-up financing should, among other things, be used to rent computing capacity on an AI cloud from Deutsche Telekom. Nvidia wants to participate in the project by sending engineers and supplying chips. According to the Handelsblatt, around a dozen German companies want to take part in the project, including Siemens, the Volkswagen subsidiary Audi and the AI ​​company Black Forest Labs.

With its chip products for data centers, Nvidia is the central driver of the AI ​​boom. Cloud heavyweights such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta in particular are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the expansion of AI data centers. Nvidia recently strengthened its position with a billion-dollar purchase of the AI ​​platform Hugging Face. The group often uses the billions in profits from its chip sales to invest - mostly in companies that are customers of the group.