NVIDIA opens GTC Berlin with AI infrastructure pitch

NVIDIA opened GTC Berlin on Wednesday with CEO Jensen Huang using his keynote to argue that AI infrastructure is becoming a new industrial base, while the company’s European event programme and partnerships underscored its push across the region.

Evidence and context

In the keynote coverage published by NVIDIA on 21 October 2026, Huang said European companies including L’Oréal, Revolut, Spotify, Merck, Vodafone, Zara, Porsche, Nestlé and HSBC are working with NVIDIA on AI. He also said NVIDIA had committed nearly $10 billion to Europe’s technology ecosystem during a weeklong roadshow that included Paris, London, Stockholm and Dublin, and that the company works with more than 12,000 partners.

Huang described AI as a “five-layer cake,” with energy, advanced computers, AI factories, tokens and digital intelligence, and applications built on top. He said the infrastructure must exist before models can emerge, comparing the need for AI infrastructure with the historical need for the internet’s networking layer and the electricity grid. “To be part of this AI economy, you don’t want to just be consuming the AI; you want to be producing the AI,” he said, according to NVIDIA’s live blog.

The conference itself runs for three days at STATION-Berlin, with more than 100 sessions on agentic AI, robotics, physical AI, open models and accelerated computing. NVIDIA’s Berlin keynote was scheduled for 21 October at the Tempodrom, while background conference material confirms the event spans 20–22 October, with workshops on 20 October and the conference and exhibition on 21–22 October.

Separate context published before the keynote is important. On 19 October, the Associated Press reported that Huang had urged German manufacturers to adopt AI while preserving their industrial expertise and keeping data in Germany. That appearance preceded GTC Berlin and should not be confused with the keynote remarks. NVIDIA’s Berlin coverage also indicates that, at the time of verification, it had posted a keynote pregame but had not yet published substantive keynote highlights, so any product launches or additional claims from the keynote remain unverified in the available material.

At the time of this report, NVIDIA’s shares were quoted at $216.47, giving the company a market capitalisation of $5,256.97 billion, according to the supplied market data timestamped 2026-10-21T09:17:55Z.