Nvidia’s Jensen Huang came to London with big checks — and a blunt message
This report is from this week’s The Tech Download newsletter. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang draws a crowd wherever he goes.
In an old converted church in West London on Wednesday night, Huang stood on a pop-up stage in front of politicians, investors, tech execs and journalists, announcing the chip giant was taking stakes in five U.K. startups.
“We’re not your largest investor, but we are your best investor,” he proclaimed. “I’m gonna invest in you, I’m gonna invest in you,” he shouted, pointing at the founders. His appearance in London was part of a European tour ahead of Nvidia’s GTC event in Berlin next week.
Earlier, he’d searched out U.K. neocloud Nscale CEO Josh Payne in the crowd, declaring, “last year you were zero.”
“Now look at them,” he said. “We invested in you, I attracted a whole bunch of investors to you.” Nscale could be the most valuable British company in a decade, Huang said to cheers from the crowd.
The Nvidia boss certainly doesn’t lack for confidence.
Co-founder, President and CEO of US technology company Nvidia, Jensen Huang, gestures during a press briefing in Paris on Oct. 13, 2026.
Joel Saget | AFP | Getty Images
Whiskey with Burnham
The warm reception Huang regularly receives is a sign of just how much sway he holds in the AI industry.
Nvidia has a near monopoly over the most powerful AI chips and Huang courts tech execs and world leaders with ease. He’s a near constant presence at U.S. President Donald Trump’s side at state dinners and visits.
In London, after the pomp and ceremony of Huang’s speech, he emerged around 40 minutes late to a media huddle outside the front of the church.
“The Prime Minister [Andy Burnham] and I had a nice whiskey together. He’s a whiskey man,” he told reporters. Later, Huang said he’d be meeting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz “in a couple of days.”
Huang spoke to journalists for nearly an hour that evening — a fair effort considering he’d only eaten a “quarter of a quarter” of a sandwich that day — dishing out praise and criticism to Europe with a bombastic assuredness.
“Nothing pains me more, frankly, than to see one of the most technologically advanced countries to be left so far behind in technology,” he said, referring to Germany.
And the U.K. didn’t escape scot-free. “If you tell an entrepreneur there’s one in a million chance they can succeed, that entrepreneur says, ‘So you’re telling me there’s a chance?’ But in the UK, somehow there’s 999,000… reasons to fail.”
Startup investments
The CEO was also bullish on Europe’s chances of succeeding with AI, not least, presumably, because Nvidia now has stakes in so many of the region’s most promising startups.
On Wednesday those lucky startups were biotechs Prima Mente and Boltz, project delivery platform Foresight, algorithm discovery startup Hiverge and quantum company Riverlane. Those companies, alongside others in the U.K. that Nvidia isn’t naming, will be the recipients of $1.16 billion of…
Read More: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang came to London with big checks — and a blunt message