If there were a million ways to win – the UK would find the one reason not to do it: Nvidia boss
Key Points
- Jensen Huang told Britain it overthinks during a London visit.
- Nvidia plans investments in five UK AI and quantum startups.
- It committed $250 million in compute for UK AI safety research.
- Lloyds, NatWest, Revolut and Starling are building AI with Nvidia.
- Fuse Energy and an NHS triage tool also run on Nvidia tech.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says Britain overthinks things too much, which is keeping it behind in the tech race. Huang was speaking at the sidelines of an event in London on Thursday (15 October) where he announced new investments in five UK startups.
Nvidia said it plans to invest in Boltz, Foresight, Hiverge, Prima Mente and Riverlane, alongside a five-year, $250 million compute commitment for UK research into agentic AI safety and security.
Huang made his remarks about the UK during a street-side Q&A in Mayfair. He praised the country’s intellect, its universities and its culture, and joked that nobody in the world could drink on the streets like the British.
“You have smart people, you have a great culture, you have young people, and the energy is vibrant,” said Huang.
“But for some reason, if there was a million ways to win, you find the one reason not to do it,” he added.
Huang pointed to a phrase used inside Nvidia, “I make my company dumb”, as the approach he wanted the UK to adopt.
“Don’t overthink things. Take a step forward, and that step will lead to another step,” said Huang.
“Believe in yourself. I even believe in you guys! That’s the reason why I invested $10 billion here,” he said.
The five startups in Nvidia’s latest round of planned investments are:
- Boltz, a London-based firm founded by MIT researchers, which builds biomolecular models and AI agents to help scientists design potential new medicines.
- Foresight, a London-based startup that helps owners of major infrastructure projects, including hyperscale data centres, predict completion dates and manage risks.
- Hiverge, a Cambridge-based firm founded by researchers from Google DeepMind and the University of Cambridge, which builds an engine that automatically writes and optimises algorithms.
- Prima Mente, a London-based AI biology startup building models to decode complex diseases, starting with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS.
- Riverlane, a Cambridge-based quantum computing company building real-time error correction hardware and software for quantum computers.
These add to Nvidia’s existing backing of UK firms including Basecamp Research, Ineffable Intelligence, Synthesia and Wayve.
Nvidia also joined the Earthshot Prize as a Global Alliance Founding Partner, providing compute and technical expertise to climate and sustainability innovators.
The chipmaker detailed how several companies UK consumers deal with every day are using its technology.
Fuse Energy is moving its customer AI onto in-house infrastructure built on Nvidia B300 Blackwell Ultra chips, which the firm said will deliver faster support to over 450,000 UK households.
OneAdvanced is deploying a fine-tuned large language model for AI triage in primary care, which Nvidia said supports millions of NHS patients.
Lloyds Banking Group built ATUM, a transaction foundation model that converts billions of banking transactions into reusable AI.
Revolut’s PRAGMA banking model, pre-trained on 26 million anonymised user histories, has moved from research into real-time use.
NatWest is working with Nvidia on Nemotron Voice to better understand how its customers across the UK speak.
Starling is developing its own banking foundation model on Civo’s UK sovereign cloud infrastructure.
Liverpool City Region is building an Nvidia-powered “City Brain”, which Nvidia described as a blueprint for dozens of unitary authorities across the UK.
Nvidia said more than 3,100 UK companies are now part of its Inception programme for startups.
The company announced a £2 billion investment in the UK’s AI startup sector in September 2025, during US President Donald Trump’s state visit.
