Welcome back to another episode of Upside where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed and Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures go behind the headlines shaping European tech, capital, and power.
This week is a high-velocity sprint through the AI model wars, hyperscaler capex, and the growing sense that SaaS is about to be structurally repriced by agents. Anthropic and OpenAI go toe-to-toe with flagship model releases just 20 minutes apart, while China quietly ships open models that are starting to look dangerously close to frontier performance at a fraction of the cost.
The panel also digs into the so-called SaaSpocalypse, the early signs of a European “uncoupling” from US big tech, and why Spain’s crackdown on social media is being reframed as a public health issue rather than a free speech fight.
And then there’s Muskanomics: the $1.5T SpaceX/xAI logic, the data-centers-in-space narrative, and whether any of it survives contact with physics.
What’s covered:
02:10 AI model arms race: Anthropic Opus 4.6 vs OpenAI GPT 5.3 (20 minutes apart)
10:45 China’s open-source push: Kimi K 2.5, Qwen3 Max, and swarm capabilities
14:05 Alphabet’s $180B capex signal and Wall Street’s “infraspend” panic
22:35 SaaSpocalypse: $300B wiped off software and the seat-based SaaS collapse narrative
30:05 US–EU uncoupling: France bans Zoom/Teams, Germany moves off Microsoft, sovereignty vibes
36:35 Spain’s social crackdown: CEO liability, under-16 bans, and the censorship slippery slope
43:30 Muskanomics: xAI + SpaceX, “data centers in space,” and why it feels like PR on steroids
56:30 Anthropic Super Bowl ads vs OpenAI: brand war and the ad-monetization fault line
59:25 Critical minerals: EU set to miss 2030 targets and China’s grip on rare earths
1:02:20 Deal of the week + Europe unicorn shout-outs + the new €1B growth fund
🎧 Listen on Apple or Spotify, or queue it for later with chapters ready to go.
AI Models: The Flagship 20-Minute Duel
Anthropic released Opus 4.6, and OpenAI hit back with GPT 5.3 just 20 minutes later — a rare moment where the frontier labs openly behave like rival sports teams.
The interesting question isn’t just “which model is better,” but whether switching costs are now workflow-deep. Claude Code has become sticky: once developers build automations and prompting systems around it, they don’t casually rip-and-replace.
Meanwhile, OpenAI claims GPT 5.3 is the first model that helped build itself by debugging its own training pipeline — a small but meaningful step toward recursive improvement narratives.
China’s Open Source Isn’t Waiting for Permission
The panel also looks at how fast Chinese labs are shipping.
Models like Kimi K 2.5 and Qwen3 Max are closing the gap on last quarter’s frontier models at dramatically lower cost and the discussion gets spicy around whether this is copying, genuine innovation, or both.
The standout here is swarming: splitting tasks across coordinated model instances. There’s a credible argument that China is pushing harder on swarm-style capabilities than the Western labs right now.
Alphabet’s $180B Capex: The Anti-Bubble Signal
Alphabet’s expected $180B capex plan for 2026 triggered a 5% stock drop, despite earnings beating expectations.
The group’s read is that this is the opposite of a bubble signal. It’s Sundar effectively telling Wall Street:
“You haven’t seen anything yet.”
Google Cloud is growing faster than peers, and the hyperscalers are still behaving like they’re capacity-constrained, not demand-constrained.
SaaSpocalypse: The Utility Retrade
Nearly $300B was wiped off global software stocks, as the market began pricing in a structural shift:
Seat-based SaaS → consumption-based SaaS → agent-based workflows.
The fear is simple: if white-collar headcount contracts, and agents don’t need seats, the pricing model collapses.
The more nuanced take: SaaS doesn’t disappear. It retrades. The IBM/mainframe analogy comes up: the tech survives, but the multiples compress.
Europe vs US Tech: The Great Uncoupling (or a Maginot Line?)
A handful of signals this week suggest Europe is pushing harder on tech sovereignty.
France is reportedly forcing 2.1M civil servants off Zoom, Teams, and WebEx and onto a state-backed platform by 2027. Germany and Austria have similar migrations underway.
The group’s skepticism is sharp: Europe should support founders and procurement pathways, not try to build clunky government forks of yesterday’s platforms.
And the hard truth: Europe exports too much to the US to play this game recklessly.
Spain Cracks Down on Social: Public Health vs Free Speech
Pedro Sánchez escalated rhetoric around social media harm, CEO accountability, and under-16 access.
The key observation: European leaders are reframing this as public health, not speech regulation which is strategically smart, but also raises the risk of “health” becoming a justification for censorship.
The group splits on whether this is a necessary correction or a slippery slope.
Muskanomics: Data Centers in Space
The most entertaining segment of the episode is also the most unsettling.
The panel tries to make sense of the xAI/SpaceX logic and the “data centers in space” narrative. Dan’s position is blunt: the physics don’t work: cooling, energy, latency, payload logistics, radiation, failure rates.
Lomax takes the opposite side: if anyone can brute-force a solution through launch cadence and experimentation at scale, it’s Musk.
Mads brings it back to incentives: the narrative doesn’t need to be true in 30 months. It only needs to be plausible enough to justify capital movement and governance decisions.
Anthropic vs OpenAI: Ads, Brand, and Betrayal
Anthropic ran Super Bowl-style ads mocking OpenAI’s move toward ad monetization.
The deeper point: OpenAI has the consumer brand. Anthropic has the enterprise/coding edge. This was Anthropic stepping onto the main stage and reminding the world they’re not just the “backend model.”
Critical Minerals: Europe’s Reality Check
The European Court of Auditors says the EU is on track to fail the Critical Raw Materials Act targets by 2030.
Europe remains heavily dependent on China for magnesium and rare earths and even when deposits are found in Sweden, permitting timelines are still measured in decades.
The uncomfortable link: you can’t talk sovereignty on cloud and AI while remaining structurally dependent on geopolitical rivals for the physical inputs.
Deals & Signals of the Week
Deal of the week: Lomax’s Portuguese founder Pedro raises a $52.5M Series A, one of the largest in Iberian history, tackling clinical trial costs with LLM-driven planning.
Signal: A new €1B European growth fund (Cambara) launches, aiming to write the kind of €30–50M checks Europe still struggles to produce at scale.
One-Line Takeaway
AI is forcing a repricing of software, a rebuild of infrastructure, and a rethink of sovereignty and Europe is still trying to fight tomorrow’s war using yesterday’s procurement logic.
