As Europe dreams of sovereign AI, Germany strikes a deal with an American giant.

In early October, the German search engine Ecosia slammed the door on Mistral after five months of partnership, trading the French AI champion for open models, some of them Chinese. On October 19, Chancellor Friedrich Merz sealed on stage in Berlin a strategic partnership with the American company Nvidia.Over the past two weeks, the narrative of a self-sufficient European AI has seriously faltered.

In Berlin, chips, startups and a statement of intent

The announcement kicked off the Invest in Germany summit, which has brought together nearly 200 business leaders in the German capital since Monday. Alongside Jensen Huang, the head of Nvidia, Friedrich Merz has formalized a cooperation between his government, the chipmaker and a group of industrial companies. The statement of intent would notably cover AI models tailored to industry. The event continues on Tuesday, with half of the German cabinet gathered around the chancellor.

Nvidia also announced stakes in four German startups: Agile Robots in robotics, Avelios Medical in healthcare, Mirelo in media and Reflex Aerospace in space. The amounts remain confidential. All of this draws on a funding package of nearly $10 billion pledged by the group to European companies, universities and laboratories.

“Open your doors to AI so that it can harness your data”, the chancellor told the country’s businesses, SMEs in particular, citing the manufacturing, mechanical engineering and automotive industries. For its part, Berlin is putting several hundred million euros on the table, notably to rent computing power from Deutsche Telekom. The scheme would center on SOOFI, the German program for open models described as sovereign, with robots and autonomous vehicles in its sights. Huang praised the country’s industrial and mathematical expertise in return, promising AI that will strengthen those capabilities rather than replace them.

Sovereignty with shifting dimensions

Christian Kroll, the founder of Ecosia, considers Mistral’s models about a year behind the competition and points to servers that are regularly saturated. He also criticizes the start-up for sourcing its electricity from nuclear power, which he says is incompatible with its engine’s climate commitments, and for having non-European investors in its capital. Among them is… Nvidia.

To replace it, the search engine turned to open models, including the Chinese Qwen, GLM and Kimi, just as Mistral was unveiling its new large model, Large 4. The German company cites quality and cost, even if doing so somewhat undercuts its own rhetoric on European independence.

In November 2025, Deutsche Telekom and Nvidia were already launching a data center in Munich worth €1 billion, with 10,000 GPUs. Google, for its part, has promised €5.5 billion in investment in Germany by 2029. Jensen Huang will drive the nail home as early as Wednesday, during his GTC conference, which is being held this week in the German capital.

👉🏻 Follow the latest tech news in real time: add 01net to your sources on Google, and subscribe to our WhatsApp channel.

Source: Nvidia