Welcome back to another episode of Upside at the EUVC Podcast, where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed, Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures unpack the headlines reshaping European venture.
This week, the trio dives into the UK’s blink-and-you-miss-it exit tax, China’s rising open-source AI threat, hyperscaler accounting drama courtesy of Michael Burry, Europe’s supply-chain vulnerabilities — and why kill switches might soon matter as much as CapEx.
🎧 Here’s what’s covered
08:42 The enterprise AI “nothingburger”: why progress is slower than adoption claims.
10:31 Nexperia: Europe’s dependence on Chinese chip packaging exposed.
11:55 The 4–6 weeks fragility window in Europe’s automotive supply chain.
13:47 EU formalises 5G vendor bans — the €3B Huawei/ZTE rip-out begins.
17:12 Dan vs. Alex Karp: “word salad” or visionary govtech architect?
20:34 Palantir’s privacy architecture: why governments keep choosing them.
23:28 Markets wobble: Nvidia leads the downturn; Apple stands alone.
28:14 Hyperscalers’ depreciation trick: why Michael Burry calls fiction.
35:12 Anthropic cyber incident: Claude “jailbroken” via social engineering.
38:27 Chinese kill switches in European buses — and what comes next.
47:55 Deals of the Week: BillionToOne’s $5B IPO & Pfizer’s $10B GLP-1 grab.
50:42 Gamma raises $68M: the Office Suite disruption finally begins.
51:58 Web Summit vs Slush: one’s corporate, one’s founder-first.
✍️ Show Notes
The Exit Tax That Wasn’t
The UK floated and instantly scrapped an “exit tax,” which would have taxed founders on unrealised gains simply for relocating.
Mads calls it what it is:
“A terrible idea. You would tax a founder as if they sold their company — even if the company later fails.”
The team also notes:
– Germany and Norway already have exit taxes.
– The UK leaked it to “test market reactions.”
– London’s global founder magnetism would have been nuked overnight.
A near-missed policy disaster.
AI Adoption: All Talk, 1% Implementation
McKinsey’s new AI report is… polite. The real headline?
99% of enterprises claim they’re using AI. Only 1% have deployed it at scale.
Lomax’s take:
“If you’re optimistic, there’s a long way to go. If you’re realistic, progress is slow.”
Dan flags a harsh signal: Verizon just laid off 30,000 people.
If AI is only 1% implemented, the labour impact is only beginning.
Nexperia & Europe’s Hidden Semiconductor Weak Spot
Nexperia - Europe’s mid-tech chip linchpin - became a geopolitical football.
Why this matters:
– Europe makes mid-tier chips,
– sends them to China for packaging,
– gets them back for automotive use,
– and has 4–6 weeks of inventory before car factories stall.
When the Dutch tried to reclaim control, China simply said:
“Fine. We’ll stop shipping the finished wafers back.”
A brutal reminder: Europe’s automotive supply chain is fragile.
Ripping Out Huawei & ZTE: The €3B Price Tag
The EU is now legally enforcing the removal of Chinese vendors from 5G networks.
Consequences:
– This has already been happening informally for five years.
– Now it’s law — and operators must comply.
– Deutsche Telekom alone: €1.2B swap-out cost.
Dan asks: “Is this trade or security?”
Lomax: “Yes.”
SPACs Are Back (Sort Of): Einride Goes Public
IDE (Einride), Sweden’s autonomous truck company, is SPAC-listing in the US at $1.8B.
They have:
– trucks deployed in Sweden & Belgium
– real revenue (ARR ~$65M)
– $500M raised to date
Unlike Nikola’s infamous $30B SPAC, this one… has trucks that actually exist.
Palantir, Alex Karp & the Philosophy of Govtech
Dan:
“He talks pure word salad. Brilliant word salad, but still.”
Lomax counters with a quote that hits home:
“A generation of founders wrapped themselves in lofty rhetoric but built photo-sharing apps.”
Love him or fear him, Karp is building the data spine for Western governments.
Market Meltdown or Mini-Correction?
Nvidia is down 10% in the past two weeks. Except Apple, the whole MAG7 is wobbling.
Two forces driving fear:
1. China’s open-source models are catching up
Mads highlights the Kim-EK-2 model:
– on some benchmarks beats frontier labs
– fully open-source
– downloadable on HuggingFace
A direct threat to the US hyperscaler flywheel.
2. Michael Burry accuses hyperscalers of “accounting fiction”
By stretching GPU depreciation from 4 to 6 years, hyperscalers inflate profits.
But reality bites:
– GPUs become obsolete fast
– data centers are ripping out hardware early
– power constraints are the real bottleneck
If they must write down assets early, we’ll see huge P&L hits.
Tech Sovereignty: Kill Switches, Buses & The End of Trust
Anthropic revealed that Chinese actors used social engineering to jailbreak Claude and probe 30+ Western organisations at “thousands of requests per second.”
Meanwhile:
– buses in Denmark, Norway, UK shipped with remote kill switches
– China supplies critical manufacturing robots
– Europe is suddenly waking up to dependency
Dan:
“How far do we go with this level of distrust? Everyone loses.”
Lomax:
“That’s the world we live in now.”
Mads:
“Trust led us to complacency. We outsourced everything. Now we’re correcting.”
AI Corner — Data Centers, CapEx & the Hard Limits
Meta pledged another $600B to compute.
AI data center CapEx expected: $4T globally over 5 years.
But will we need all that compute?
Dan: “If open-source gets cheaper and better, do we still need hyperscale?”
Mads:
“Yes. This is Jevons paradox. The cheaper it gets, the more we’ll consume.”
Energy and water may ultimately be the rate-limiters.
💸 Deals of the Week
1. BillionToOne — $5B Nasdaq IPO
YC S17 | Molecular diagnostics | Turkish co-founder
– $152M 2024 revenue
– $125M 1H 2025
– Hummingbird (UK) owned nearly 20% at IPO
– Libertas is also a major holder
A monster European win in biotech-adjacent diagnostics.
2. Metasense (GLP-1) — Acquired by Pfizer for $10B
Novo Nordisk was the underbidder.
The GLP-1 race increasingly resembles AI: big pharma buying speed.
Huge returns for top US & EU biotech VCs.
A badly needed morale boost for the sector.
3. Gamma — $68M Series B (a16z)
Presentation generator → Office Suite disruptor?
Dan’s pick because:
If anything breaks Word + PowerPoint, it starts like this.
💡 One-Liner Takeaway
Europe is waking up to a harsher world — one where sovereignty, security, and real AI economics finally matter.
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