Inside a converted church in the heart of Mayfair, London, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang moved through the crowd, greeting founders, business leaders and — at one point, raising a toast to the startups in attendance.

NVIDIA’s U.K. AI Ecosystem Reception at Mercato Mayfair lauded the U.K. as a thriving center for technology innovation.

Huang took to the stage in front of a packed room, the crowd spilling over into the balcony sections. He played to the London crowd by mentioning how several NVIDIA architectures have been named after English scientists.

After thanking the audience for their contributions and continued work with NVIDIA, he emphasized the importance of safety — especially with regard to agents, which he said must be transparent — and how AI will help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges.

“AI is our best shot at accelerating the transition to sustainable energy,” he said.

Huang also underscored that “AI is not just the model,” and that “in order for the U.K. to participate in the AI economy, you have to participate in every single layer of the AI economy, the AI industry.”

To spur those efforts, Huang announced NVIDIA’s planned investments in U.K. startups across medicine, AI research, infrastructure and quantum computing — part of a broader commitment to invest nearly $10 billion to Europe’s technology ecosystem.

Kanishka Narayan, the U.K.’s Minister for Artificial Intelligence, joined Huang and the startup founders on stage for a toast.

“Go U.K.!” Huang said. “You gotta put pedal to the metal, and let’s get the U.K. ecosystem flywheel going in the U.K.”

Developers packed One Triton Square in London today to build their own autonomous agents at Build-a-Claw, an event that gave attendees access to NVIDIA-powered computers to design their own agent, no coding required.

The gathering was part of NVIDIA’s tour through Europe ahead of GTC Berlin next week — and featured a visit by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.

“OpenClaw, as you know, makes it possible for the agent to be able to deal with memory, orchestrate action and use tools. As a result, we have now seen an inflection, and artificial intelligence has become useful,” Huang told the crowd, citing applications including drug discovery, coding, marketing and academic research.

Huang described the need for an isolation layer, “another operating system inside the operating system,” to ensure agents are operating securely.

“And so we created this thing called OpenShell,” Huang said. “Whatever the task you give to your agent, you then give it minimum rights, minimum privileges, and then you monitor it to make sure it’s compliant with policy.”

Huang also called attendees up to the stage to award raffle prizes including a signed NVIDIA DGX Spark.

AI Safety and Security Research Forum

Earlier in the day, Huang joined U.K. researchers at the AI Safety and Security Research Forum at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering. His visit followed NVIDIA’s announcement of a compute donation valued at $250 million over five years to support U.K. agentic safety and security research.

The forum brought together some of the UK’s most talented engineers working on the biggest problems in AI safety. Two shared challenges emerged from the session: securing multi-agent systems, where individually secure agents can still form insecure systems, and rapidly scaling safety at the same pace as capability. Huang and others made the case for openness as the foundation for effective defense, and highlighted the UK’s world-leading strength in AI safety. He argued open models and solutions put defensive power in everyone’s hands.

“We need to democratize self-defense,” Huang said. “We need a community of people watching each others’ backs.”

Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge computing at NVIDIA, joined European Union and local leaders at the International AI Summit in Dublin to celebrate the talent, ambition and spirit of innovation in Ireland and across Europe.

Talla spoke on a panel titled The AI Backbone: Power, Cloud and Critical Infrastructure, joined by Robin Colwell, senior vice president of government affairs at Intel; Charlotte Baylac de la Codre, head of public affairs for compute at Mistral AI; and Jason Lynch, CEO of Equal 1, to discuss what it takes to power Europe’s next era of compute.

The panel’s moderator John Thornhill, innovation editor at the Financial Times, began the discussion by invoking NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s description of AI as a five-layer cake, with the layers (from the bottom up) comprising energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications.

The question for Talla: Which layers can Europe play in? All of them, was the short answer Talla gave — but the most important layer for European nations to focus on is applications.

“When you have an AI factory, you’re providing energy and out comes intelligence,” Talla said. “It’s quite simply the most valuable commodity that humanity can have. The question then is, once you have this intelligence, how much do you need? Well, the answer should be as much as you can get.”

And then, what do you apply that intelligence toward?

Talla’s answer for Europe’s small and large enterprises as well as governments takes into consideration the region’s phenomenal manufacturing expertise.

“Physical AI is the next big opportunity,” Talla told the audience, describing the use of robotics to move atoms, create physical objects and perform physical tasks. “Around 70% of GDP is in the physical world, and that makes physical AI one of the largest opportunities ahead of us. Europe can combine AI with its human capital, engineering expertise and industrial capabilities to create more value.”

That value will also extend to Europe’s small and medium businesses.

“Physical AI can bring capabilities that were previously available mainly to large enterprises to small and medium-sized companies,” Talla said. “That creates a major opportunity for Europe’s manufacturing base and its small and medium-sized manufacturers.”

And it will result in applications of AI — at every layer of the stack — that are uniquely European.

“At the model and application layers, local knowledge and local market understanding really matter,” Talla said. “We want to enable the entire ecosystem across startups and universities — everywhere — because ultimately those can become the large companies of the future.”

Salle des Tirages, a historic hall on Place Vendôme, has hosted events of consequence for more than a century. On Tuesday evening, it held France’s latest ecosystem moment as founders, policymakers, researchers and press gathered for NVIDIA’s France AI Ecosystem Reception.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang took the stage to discuss NVIDIA’s investments in Europe and the need for safe and secure technology development.

“Europe is one of the great regions of industrial manufacturing,” Huang said. “This is the beginning of the AI journey for the EU.”

Roland Lescure, France’s Minister of the Economy, joined Huang onstage to talk about France’s strategy for innovation and economic growth.

“We want Europe to enjoy this revolution that’s going to create prosperity, jobs and revenue,” Lescure said. “For this we need pioneers.”

As attendees mingled at the reception, crowds gathered around a couple tiny guests: Microducks, 10-inch biped robots by Hugging Face that run on open source software.

Huang also stepped outside to address the press gathered at the venue about secure technology deployment.

“Containment and monitoring are the fundamental pillars of AI,” he said.

Later that evening, Huang met with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace to discuss NVIDIA’s contribution to France’s thriving AI ecosystem through investments spanning startups, AI-native companies and computing infrastructure.

They also spoke about the importance of open source for France and Europe, AI safety and NVIDIA’s recent launch of its Open Agent Safety Platform.

On the afternoon before NVIDIA’s France Ecosystem Reception, hundreds of developers gathered at Pavillon Vendôme to build physical AI — and get a surprise visit from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

Pavillon Vendôme sits just off Place Vendôme in the 1st arrondissement — one of the most storied addresses in Paris. On Tuesday afternoon, it was full of claws.

NVIDIA’s Build-a-Claw came to France with developers from the nation’s startup community and big companies alike packing into the pavilion. The excited crowd was lined up around the block to try their hands (and brains) at building AI-powered robotic claw machines using open models and NVIDIA’s platform.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang dropped in on the robotic fun chatting with the crowds inside and outside, and showing off NVIDIA DGX Spark and RTX Spark AI computing powerhouse machines.

“The world’s first computers that unite all the software the world has ever created,” Huang said.

Huang then raffled off one of each of the machines, signing the DGX Spark and handing out an autographed “IOU” for the wildly popular RTX machine, since it’s sold out at the moment.

The crowd of developers did not miss a beat, claws were waiting, and went back to building.

The Paris Build-a-Claw was NVIDIA’s second event of the day, after a morning Build-a-Claw in Barcelona drew another big crowd at the Palacio de Pedralbes. He next headed to the nearby Salle des Tirages for an evening ecosystem reception with France’s AI leaders.

A single day, and already there is a sense of the huge excitement and ambition across the tech ecosystem in both countries. More news, and more countries to come.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/gtc-berlin-2026-news/