DRM News captured Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on stage in Berlin to debate AI safety, regulation and German industry.
Huang framed the visit as an investment pitch. He traced Nvidia from PC gaming in 2000 to German workstations via Elsa, then into cars through Audi in 2005 and a 2020 autonomous driving pact with Mercedes chief Ola Källenius.
His factory vision is binary. Every firm will run two factories, he said, one real and one digital twin so faithful that most work happens inside the simulation.
Inside that twin, engineers will build digital cars with digital brains, while AI robots build physical cars in physical plants. Merz countered with German data and the Mittelstand, calling the country's industrial data a national resource and urging small and midsize firms to open it to AI, as Källenius handed him a model of the new S-Class promised to drive autonomously in Germany by year end.
Huang said safety must be engineered, not wished for. He set out three pillars: invent safety technology, enforce company best practices, and regulate applications, not base models. Merz said Berlin agrees on balance and already carved machinery out of the EU general AI Act, though he admitted a European or global framework is still far off.
