Hosts: Mads Jensen (moderator), Lomax Ward (Lisbon beach bum), Dr. Andrew Scott (serial mute-button offender) Missing: Dan Bowyer — scaling actual mountains. We told him to come back alive. Mostly because nobody else wants to moderate.

[02:30] — ARM vs Spotify: One the Market Loves, One It Doesn't Both posted good numbers. ARM got rewarded, Spotify got a -13% haircut and a 25% YTD drawdown despite record margins and 761m MAUs. Lomax calls ARM's AGI CPU pivot a "bet the farm." Mads drops the CPU:GPU ratio shift from 1:8 to potentially 1:1 as agentic AI explodes tool calls. Infrastructure compounds, consumer optimises, and the market knows which is which.

[10:38] — Anthropic: $200bn Google Deal, $45bn ARR, Just Give Them Europe Too $200bn to Google Cloud. ARR at $45bn (up from ~$9bn in January). Potential $50bn raise north of $1tn. Lomax declares Anthropic "so, so hot right now" — secondary-market appetite lives in WhatsApp groups and members' club washrooms.

[16:15] — Enterprise AI JVs: Palantir Meets Accenture Meets PE's Existential Crisis Anthropic and OpenAI both announced PE-backed JVs on May the 4th. Zero investor overlap. Andrew warns frontier labs risk becoming expensive consulting firms. Lomax: PE returns are compressed, LPs restless, AI is the new pitch to juice portfolio EBITDA. Everyone agrees this is IPO prep dressed in a consulting trench coat.

[23:15] — Mythos, Trump's AI Safety U-Turn, and Regulatory Capture Mythos is so good at hacking that Trump is drafting FDA-style pre-deployment AI reviews — having revoked Biden's AI EO on Day One. Andrew deploys the nuclear weapons analogy (drink!). Lomax offers the conspiracy theory: everyone in the administration has so much money in these companies that regulation now suits them. He then distances himself from that theory. Barely.

[31:30] — EU vs Meta/WhatsApp: Brussels Says Open Sesame, Zuck Says Pay Me Meta kicked rival chatbots out of WhatsApp, offered to let them back for a fee. Brussels rejected it. Mads lands the kill shot: open banking made UK payments vastly superior to America's. Sometimes the regulator is right. Potential fine: ~$16-20bn.

[39:27] — ASML: "No One Is Coming for Us" (Famous Last Words?) Fouquet went to Milken and said "come at me." Lomax notes China isn't replicating EUV — they're engineering around it with Huawei's CloudMatrix. Mads roasts Fouquet for lacking Jensen's paranoia. Lomax delivers the closer: founder mode vs. conference mode.

[46:33] — UK Fusion: Always 30 Years Away, Now Only 10 (Maybe) Sounds like a Bond villain's energy company: Gates money + American stellarator IP + UK magnets. 400MW by mid-2030s. Andrew: "magnets are not the reactor." Lomax: anemic growth, £120bn in interest payments, defence plan a year overdue. Building a fusion industry — or buying a franchise?

[56:09] — 🏆 Deal of the Week: SAP Acquires Prior Labs for €1bn 15-month-old startup. €9m seed. €1bn exit. The "GPT for spreadsheets." Possibly the fastest seed-to-exit in European venture history.

[57:30] — Week Ahead: Anthropic IPO board watch (they won't) · EU AI Act trilogue (~13 May) · Tencent Q1 earnings (13 May) · Fed transition — Powell's last day (15 May) · SpaceX S-1 (week of 18-22 May)

[59:46] — Dan's back next week. The nation breathes a sigh of relief.

Every week on Upside, we look behind the headlines to expose the real news affecting European venture, startups and investing.

Charles hands Trump a bell, Musk says he's not building AGI (this week), and Brussels manages 12 hours of trilogue with absolutely nothing to show for it. Meanwhile Big Tech spent the GDP of a small country on GPUs, and Europe, yes, Europe, quietly dropped two near-billion-dollar AI rounds out of UCL. Buckle up.

(00:48) Round-up King Charles's grooming of Trump hits new heights with HMS Trump's actual ship's bell. Whisky tariff dropped one win, banked. Hormuz still a mess, Brent at $126, Canada launches a sovereign wealth fund, and Musk testifies under oath that Tesla isn't pursuing AGI. Six weeks after saying it would. Pick your audience, pick your claim.

(02:42) Big Tech Earnings: capex needs cloud growth to justify itself Alphabet (+22%, cloud +63%) and Amazon (AWS +28%) get rewarded. Microsoft and Meta punished. Meta's stock down 8.5% for the crime of having no cloud P&L. Apple, supposedly the AI laggard, is the only one to trade up after print: iPhone +22%, Greater China +28%, and Tim Cookie insists AI will be "fast, personal, private." Memory is the new bottleneck SK Hynix sold out for all of 2026.

(09:14) Frontier-Lab Politics: state-level chess Musk vs Altman in court, with OpenAI's lawyer delivering the line of the week. China blocks Meta's $2bn Manus acquisition not tit-for-tat, but China running the US export-control playbook in reverse. Google's "up to $40bn" into Anthropic at a flat valuation: smart hedge, not a bailout.

(14:31) Europe quietly outperforms Ineffable: $1.1bn at $5.1bn, David Silver, RL-from-scratch. Recursive Superintelligence: $500m, Tim Rocktäschel, AI that improves itself. Two UCL professors, two near-unicorn rounds, one week. The DeepMind diaspora is real.

(16:29) Frontier Models: monetisation arrives GPT-5.5, Kimi K2.6, Grok 4.3, Opus 4.7 all in eight days. Cadence is no longer the story. OpenAI doubled API prices. Anthropic pulled every quiet lever it had, and your Claude bill went 10-50x. Nobody's leaving. Run-rate $9bn → $30bn in four months. Models commoditise; stacks don't.

(21:09) SpaceX S-1: $1.75–2tn target Biggest IPO in history filing in May. 220x earnings. Bull case is space compute Musk's bet that we run out of Earth-based power before we run out of orbital sunlight. Don't bet against him, etc.

(26:54) EU AI Act vs UK AI Plan Trilogue collapses. The Omnibus that would have softened the Act is what died Act now harder, not easier. London becomes the only place in Europe to build an AI lab. Not enough, but we'll take it.

(30:04) Energy & SMRs UK industrial energy: 125% above EU-14 median. SMRs won't power a data centre until the 2030s. Even fixing energy doesn't fix the electrician shortage. Build everything, in parallel, yesterday.

(35:43) Predictions Dan: France becomes Europe's OPEC by Q1 2027. Mads: Anthropic should IPO, probably won’t, the May board vote is the marker.

Deal of the Week (38:40) Mads: Ineffable, obviously. Dan: Atech, £681k from Lovable, making hardware prototyping accessible.

Until next week, muchachos.

Upside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the real news behind the headlines affecting European venture startups and investing. Hosted by Mads and Dan from SuperSeed.

This week: the EU admits it wrote a bad AI Act (shocking), Sergey Brin is wheeled out of retirement again, SpaceX buys a coding company because of course, and Wall Street invents a new way to short private credit. Dan and Mads untangle.

(02:00) DeepSeek V4 drops overnight — Chinese open-weights model benchmarking at Opus 4.6 level. The gap between Western frontier and Chinese open source is now 78 days. Trained entirely on Huawei chips, so the three-year US chip embargo has been going brilliantly. Anthropic will probably survive, but NVIDIA might want to glance at its share price.

(07:30) The EU quietly euthanises its own AI Act — Monday's trilogue is gutting the juicy bits and calling it "simplification." Translation: Brussels is admitting it was wrong without admitting it was wrong. Europe needs inference chips, public procurement as anchor demand, pension capital unlocked, a real 28th regime, and nuclear next to datacentres. Otherwise we're just tidying.

(11:00) Cyber week: three stories, one confused headline — France's ANTS loses 19M identity records (run by Atos, which is insolvent, what could possibly go wrong). The UK Biobank "breach" isn't a breach, it's a 2003 open-science policy finally meeting 2026 strategic competition.

(18:40) Sergey Brin un-retires (third time lucky?) — Leaked DeepMind memo: every Gemini engineer must now use Google's own agents, because they'd been quietly reaching for Claude Code when they actually wanted to ship. Embarrassing. Meanwhile Google owns 14% of Anthropic and just sold them $10bn of TPUs. Panic stations over here, revenue party over there. Beautifully incestuous.

(24:20) SpaceX options Cursor at $60bn — or pays $10bn in compute to walk away. OpenAI has Codex, Anthropic has Claude Code, xAI had vibes. Now it has a distribution front door. Every frontier lab is becoming an application company. Europe's shot is here; Lovable, enterprise workflows, anything touching physical AI.

(28:45) Europe has ceded space to SpaceX — we just haven't admitted it — Starlink: 7,000 satellites. Eutelsat: 600. IRIS² won't be operational until ~2030. The architecture's right, the scale is pathetic, procurement is pork-barrel nonsense. Fix: scrap ESA geographical return, let a thousand flowers bloom at every input layer, anchor with state demand.

(33:30) Wall Street opens a short on private credit — JPM, Barclays, Morgan Stanley now making markets in CDS against Blackstone, Apollo, Ares. ~20% of BDC loans went to SaaS. AI is eating 25-35% of that. Blackstone took $3.8bn of redemptions in Q1 and posted its first monthly loss in three years. Not 2008, but a slow, jagged repricing of old-economy SaaS.

(40:30) Predictions — Dan: the next trillion-dollar European company will be a defence prime, not software. Anthropic crosses $100bn ARR and never IPOs (Mads: sad, it should).

(41:20) Deals of the week — Mads: ATMOS Space Cargo (€25.7M Series A: Europe can finally bring things back from orbit without asking SpaceX, Russia, or China nicely). Dan: €1.07bn into 57 EDF defence projects, yikes grants, yes, but hopefully the bedrock rather than a grantrepreneur buffet.

(43:30) Week ahead — EU AI Act trilogue Tuesday, Ariane 6 launching American Kuiper satellites the same day (the irony writes itself), $14 trillion of hyperscaler earnings Wednesday, and a BoE decision that's drifted from "two cuts" to "possibly a hike." Cheers, Iran.