Berlin (AFP) – European companies from automakers to drug firms to banks need to embrace artificial intelligence, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday, as the continent looks to capitalise on the technology even as the United States and China drive its development.
Speaking at a Nvidia-hosted conference in Berlin, the boss of the US chip giant said European companies needed to be comfortable working with AI. “Whether it’s in the automotive industry, because we’re building self-driving cars, or the way you manufacture with robotics, the way you discover new drugs in healthcare, your financial services industry, all of these different industries have to become AI companies,” Huang said. “Every single one of them.”
Concern has risen in Europe that its traditional industrial champions will lose out as software and artificial intelligence become increasingly important parts of a product’s design and usefulness. Some have touted “industrial AI” as a possible avenue for Europe since its renowned machine makers — such as Germany’s Siemens and France’s Schneider Electric — have products installed in factories worldwide. That means the firms sit on potentially valuable data that could be used to train AI on and for the factory floor.
“Please open your doors for AI to make use of your data,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Monday in a message to the country’s small and midsize industrial firms. “This is a real secret and a real advantage for Germany to make use of all the data that is already available in our companies,” he said.
Huang also touted Nvidia OpenShell, a so-called sandbox he said would allow users to make sure that AI agents did not overstep user-defined boundaries. A survey of 603 companies released in September by the German digital association Bitkom found that 45 percent of respondents were concerned that the security of sensitive commercial data could be undermined by the use of third-party AI tools.
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