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Jensen fans are busy.
Nvidia’s GTC in Berlin was the grand finale of a week and a half long European tour. Huang met with world leaders including British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, unveiled new products and spent time conversing with a small robot duck on stage.
The head of Nvidia must be tired. During a media Q&A Thursday morning, he gave reporters some insight into his beliefs. “Try sleeping less, that’s what I’m doing,” Huang said of bringing data centers online faster.
And for Juan, the journey isn’t over yet. He is currently in Kazakhstan, touting the country’s potential as a major AI hub.
Amid all the activity in Germany, I spent two days in Berlin running around meeting with NeoCloud executives, investors, and data center builders and suppliers.
We will introduce the main themes covered here.
During a keynote at Nvidia GTC in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, October 21, 2026, Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang unveiled the Microduck made by Pollen Robotics. Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Neocloud’s Distress
The final day of the conference came amid a decline in NeoCloud’s public stock. coreweave It ended the day down 10%. Nevius It fell 7% by market close.
It’s been a turbulent period for companies that lease AI computing, with many stocks plummeting on concerns about borrowing too much.
Huang was more bullish, perhaps unsurprisingly given Nvidia’s large stakes in many of these companies.
“If you look at the fundamentals, the demand for neocloud is off the charts,” Huang told CNBC.
Nevertheless, many of those we spoke to at GTC were concerned about the neocloud sector. An executive at an AI infrastructure company I spoke with said the “hugeness of companies without credit ratings” is “disrupting the market.”
Data centers are shrinking
On stage in Berlin, Huang unveiled a new product designed to be packed into a shipping container with seven Nvidia Vera Rubin AI racks and transported over regular roads.
This is an effort to bring AI computing online faster in the face of huge demand. Huang told the audience that billions of dollars in revenue could be lost due to delays in getting data centers up and running.
“Moving this into the supply chain will accelerate the speed at which we can start operating,” he said.
Major computing consumers are already exploring opportunities for smaller data center deployments. Sources told me in September that OpenAI and Anthropic were exploring a small AI data center deal.
Capital could become the next big bottleneck
Building AI infrastructure costs a lot of money.
Goldman Sachs estimates that AI-related capital spending could total about $7.6 trillion from 2026 to 2031, including computing, data centers, and power.
Huang told a Berlin audience on Wednesday that a 1-gigawatt data center would cost about $50 billion.
“What’s missing in the middle is working capital to fuel that growth… because there’s so much demand across so many areas of AI that there’s not enough capital,” he said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday.
“The demand for capital far exceeds the availability of capital,” he told colleague Arjun Karpal, but the CEO added, “That will be resolved.”
“Capital will soon become the bottleneck,” said an executive at an AI infrastructure finance company I spoke to during the hearing.
News editing
OpenAI is nearing a funding round of up to $30 billion at a valuation of $1.25 trillion led by UAE investors.
Mr. Musk said. tesla and space x A special committee was set up to discuss the merger at this week’s financial results conference.
President Trump said data centers should pay “dividends” to local communities to gain support amid public backlash against the facilities.
OpenAI’s most powerful AI models overrode their own safety monitoring, and one of them lied about it.
The Trump administration has banned Chinese AI startup DeepSeek from U.S. civilian government agencies, citing security concerns.
One more thing
On October 16, 2026, soldiers from the Separate Mission Rifle Battalion of the National Police of Ukraine in the Zaporizhzhya region installed a Starlink satellite communication terminal at a combat base in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
Dmytro Smolyenko | Ukrinform | Future Publishing | Getty Images
Yesterday, my colleagues Annie Palmer and Laura Kolodny dug into how demand for alternative satellite internet services is accelerating amid Ukraine’s problems with SpaceX’s Starlink and StarShield.
However, as they write, few alternatives to the company’s system exist, and other options are not yet comparable.
