Economy German crisis
Thiel and Huang criticise Germany's technological decline
Investor Peter Thiel and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang criticised, on two separate occasions, Germany's technological and industrial decline. Journalist Alessandro Aresu wrote about it in Startmag.
Peter Thiel, born in Frankfurt in 1967, returned to Germany to receive the Axel Springer Award and for a long conversation with Axel Springer's chief executive, Mathias Döpfner. He spoke of his home country with affection, but described it as a place at a standstill, paralysed by what he called "fear of success".
According to Thiel, there is a real "German disease": founders sell their companies too early, or settle into a comfortable niche instead of aiming to grow globally. He also noted that Germany's wealthiest young people owe their fortune mainly to inheritance rather than to building new businesses, unlike what he calls, in the United States, "creative destruction".
Similar criticism came from Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, who spoke in London about Germany's technological decline. Huang said it was especially painful to watch one of the world's most technologically advanced countries fall behind, which he called "the homeland of engineers".
Nvidia and Black Forest Labs
In Berlin, while presenting the RTX Spark laptops, Huang called Robin Rombach on stage, co-founder and chief executive of Black Forest Labs, recalling that Rombach had once been his intern.
Black Forest Labs is an artificial intelligence lab based in Freiburg, known for its FLUX family of visual models. In 2026 the company expanded into video generation and robotics. Its shareholders include Nvidia and the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz. At the end of 2025 the company was valued at 3.25 billion dollars. In March 2026 Nvidia named it one of eight founding members of the Nemotron Coalition, alongside Cursor, LangChain, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Reflection AI, Sarvam and Thinking Machines Lab, an initiative to develop open frontier AI models.
Nvidia also has long-standing partnerships with Siemens and Mercedes, and supplies Germany's manufacturing industry with products and systems presented as a digital leap for the sector. According to Aresu, US companies like Nvidia benefit from a capital advantage over the European ecosystem.
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