Nebius, the AI cloud company trading under the ticker NBIS, has launched what it calls a "Physical AI Living Lab" aimed at robotics startups across the UK and Europe. The facility is built on NVIDIA technologies and is paired with a dedicated startup accelerator program connected to NVIDIA's Robotics Program, according to reports from Benzinga and Yahoo Finance.
The announcement arrives alongside a broader UK expansion by Nebius, which is adding more NVIDIA-powered cloud infrastructure and new capabilities for agentic and enterprise AI workloads, according to the company. Simply Wall St. notes the initiative is designed to directly link Nebius's cloud GPU capacity to rising demand in the robotics sector.
The NVIDIA Blog framed the development as part of the UK's larger push toward what it describes as "sovereign AI" — the ambition to build domestically controlled AI infrastructure using NVIDIA technologies, positioning Britain as a competitive hub for the next generation of AI development.
For robotics startups, access to high-powered GPU compute has historically been a serious bottleneck. Training and testing physical AI systems — robots, autonomous machines, industrial automation tools — demands enormous simulation time that small companies often can't afford. A dedicated living lab combined with an accelerator program could let early-stage teams bypass that barrier and compress the journey from prototype to product.
The move also reflects Nebius's broader strategy: become the default cloud partner for physical AI companies by riding NVIDIA's dominant position in AI hardware into an emerging and fast-growing sector.
As AI shifts from purely digital applications into machines that operate in the real world, the companies that control the supporting infrastructure and startup pipelines stand to shape who wins — and that's exactly what this lab is designed to do.