Netherlands strikes deal with Nvidia for AI supercomputing hub

The Dutch government has reached a deal with Nvidia to supply hardware and expertise for the construction of an AI facility in the Netherlands. 

The facility will centre around an AI supercomputer aimed at accelerating research and development, as the country pushes to further digitalise its economy, according to a statement made Thursday.  

The Dutch Minister for Economic Affairs Dirk Beljaarts is currently in Silicon Valley, where he is meeting with executives at Nvidia. The world’s second most valuable company, Nvidia is a world leader in graphics processing units (GPUs) for artificial intelligence applications. 

“Before a shovel can go into the ground, we need to be sure that the required knowledge and hardware is available,” said Minister Beljaarts. “Today the Netherlands has taken an important step together with Nvidia. This brings the construction of a Dutch AI facility a lot closer.”

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The ministry didn’t provide a timeline or specific details for the AI facility. Nvidia declined our request for comment. 

The Netherlands, which ranked in the top 10 most digitised countries globally last year, is pushing to position itself as a leader in AI. In January last year, the government ringfenced over €200mn to boost local investment in the technology. 

“Asia and the US have taken the lead [in AI] and Europe will have to catch up,” said the former economic affairs minister Micky Adriaansens at the time. 

Key priorities of the government’s strategy include fostering AI talent, building infrastructure, ensuring safe applications, and enabling cooperation through entities like the Dutch AI Coalition. Last year, the Benelux nation also embarked on building its own “safer” large language model (LLM), called GPT-NL.

To execute its plans, the Netherlands is going to need more computing power to train AI machines. Aside from Nvidia, Beljaarts is also meeting with chipmaker AMD. The Minister is also in California to “strengthen relations” between Dutch and American technology companies more broadly, the government said.