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Nvidia is in advanced discussions to invest $500mn in UK self-driving car company Wayve, as part of the US chipmaker’s planned £2bn funding pledge earmarked for British start-ups.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, announced the prospective deal as he stood alongside British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at an event in London on Thursday following President Donald Trump’s state visit.
He also promised several more investments in UK-based companies, including financial technology group Revolut, telling the audience of tech entrepreneurs and investors that “the [first] trillion-dollar company in the UK will be an AI company . . . that’s for sure”.
Starmer said: “Today we put tech out there as a special feature of the special relationship. Thank you so much Jensen for your confidence in what we are doing and your investment.”
During Trump’s state visit, the prime minister signed a new tech agreement with the US and secured pledges of tens of billions of dollars of investment from American Big Tech groups including Microsoft and Google.
London-based Wayve, which was founded in 2017, has emerged as one of the UK’s most prominent artificial intelligence start-ups, after raising a $1bn round led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank last year.
The proposed Nvidia investment will form part of a new funding round, Wayve said, without providing further details of the deal.
The two companies have signed a letter of intent to evaluate a $500mn strategic investment, Wayve said in a statement.
At the event, Huang listed eight UK start-ups including Revolut, AI video company Synthesia and autonomous transport group Oxa, telling each one in turn: “I’m going to invest in your next round.” Nvidia has already backed several of the companies listed by Huang, including Wayve, which first took an equity investment from the chipmaker last year.
Wayve chief executive Alex Kendall said it has used Nvidia’s systems since 2018.
Kendall said he has seen “a complete U-turn” in investor appetite in the last year. “The interest is like nothing I’ve experienced before,” he said, but added: “The automotive industry requires patience.”
Wayve signed its first partnership to deploy its technology with a major carmaker, Nissan, in April.
Earlier this week, Nvidia said it would invest £500mn into Nscale, a London-based cloud computing provider specialising in AI. The Silicon Valley AI chipmaker said it would deploy £2bn worth of equity financing and AI infrastructure, by working alongside venture capital firms Accel, Air Street Capital, Balderton Capital, Hoxton Ventures and Phoenix Court.
Nvidia also said that more than 120,000 of its AI processors would be deployed in the UK by cloud computing groups Nscale and US-based CoreWeave, to be used by tech groups including OpenAI and Microsoft.
The US hopes that the export of American AI systems will make countries such as the UK allies in its technological arms race with China.
US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who also appeared alongside Huang on Thursday night in London, urged his British counterpart, UK business and trade secretary Peter Kyle, not to regulate AI too heavily.
“We need standards, not safety,” Lutnick said.
In an acknowledgment of the Trump administration’s pressure to accelerate rather than regulate AI, the UK renamed its AI Safety Institute to the AI Security Institute in February. Lutnick said the original branding suggested that people ought to be “afraid” of the technology.
“It was all regulation [and] fear,” Lutnick said, as he also criticised the Biden administration’s AI diffusion rules, which limited the shipment of Nvidia’s chips to certain countries.
“We had to get rid of that nonsense,” Lutnick said, adding that losing the AI race “is not a possibility for America”.
