Quick links + thinking out loud, May 2025
Hi all, I’m currently writing this on a plane to Berlin. This last month I’ve been to London, Paris, Lisbon, Marrakech and soon Berlin and Munich! It’s been awesome to meet and catch up many of you with so many of you.
The current energy around deeptech is insatiable - it’s an exciting, complex time, with headwinds turning into tailwinds and vice versa - never have tech founders had so much relevance in setting the future global agenda and ensuring Western prosperity.
A particular highlight of last week, was speaking on a panel about investing in resilience in Marrakech(!). Some of you may know, I’m half Moroccan, and it felt like a homecoming of sorts:
Anyway, sharing some thoughts and links with you. As ever, I’ll keep the meatier insights and analysis for the regular monthly next Sunday. Onwards.
Agree, disagree? Message me, I want to hear your thoughts.
ICYMI
I published a piece on ensuring Europe’s Industrial Prosperity, give it a read
Everything that happened last month in technology geopolitics
💡Things I’ve been thinking:
(ideas not facts)
Europe - US decoupling will mean Euro VCs will need to fund more novel ideas
The US has been several years ahead of Europe in terms of tech business creation
For years, European founders and investors could build on American blueprints, with a time lag providing strategic advantage
This has enabled ‘copy cat’ businesses at scale
As the two continents geopolitical ambitions diverge, so will conditions on the ground and the potential for business success
Is it the end of this free lunch?
‘European re-armament’ will become narrative shorthand for EU federalisation and huge fiscal stimulus
The EU will consolidate power and boost growth through the narrative of an external security threat
The EU has long suffered from a lack of unified policy direction and sluggish growth as a second order effect
The weaponisation of external threats may offer the political cover to overcome those structural constraints
Consolidation of power is starting: with calls to expand Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) to broader areas, negating unanimous decision making at an EU-level, and the silencing of democratically voted political parties
Some reads I enjoyed:
💵 From the US petrodollar to technodollar (Henry Gladwyn): A fantastic piece, by friend, ex-colleague and newsletter subscriber Henry Gladwyn 👋🏼. He posits that the US is trying to create a new world order based on control of the AI "stack": compute, cloud, models, and applications as the geopolitical leverage point.
The above may be evidenced by Trump’s deals in the Middle East this week, with the UAE is building a 5Gw datacenter outside the US, with 2.5m NVIDIA B200 chips. You could explain Trump’s deals as; 1) good business
2) a failure of US energy policy (unable to power the world’s largest datacenter domestically) 3) a real possibility that the US just sold its tech edge
This fits the framework I’d shared in February for Trump’s geopolitical actions, namely separating Russia & China economically, and renegotiating global trade away from China:
“Trump is creating leverage and wants to catch competing nations off guard, to negotiate favourable economic terms for the US in the new world order”
However, I personally believe that 1) giving control to a foreign state of leading AI capabilities will not lead to continued US dominance 2) that China will surpass the US in AI
🟠 The most important decision of the Trump Administration?(Marginal Revolution): Tyler Cowen also reflected my latter argument: “Of course Saudi and the UAE have plenty of energy, including oil, solar, and the ability to put up nuclear quickly. We can all agree that it might be better to put these data centers on US territory, but of course the NIMBYs will not let us build at the required speeds. Not doing these deals could mean ceding superintelligence capabilities to China first. Or letting other parties move in and take advantage of the abilities of the Gulf states to build out energy supplies quickly.”
🍟Ben Thompson interviews Jensen Huang (Stratechery): the NVIDIA CEO argues that US chip export controls risk fracturing the global AI ecosystem and accelerating China’s development of competing platforms, threatening CUDA’s dominance. Whilst his stance reflects commercial self-interest, it highlights a core tension. America’s national security strategy may be undermining its own tech competitiveness
🧠 DeepMind creates advanced evolutionary LLM framework which creates novel algorithms in computing (Google DeepMind): AlphaEvolve moves LLMs from summarisation tools to creation tools, with the initial release focused on code and algorithm generation. We’d previously covered LLM scientists and “a datacentre of Einsteins” in March
🟢 NVIDIA’s roadmap to Embodied AI, by Dr. Jim Fan (Sequoia): NVIDIA’s co-head of the GEAR Lab, introduces the concept of the Physical Turing Test and explains how simulation at scale will unlock the future of robotics
🇩🇪 Germany drops stance on Nuclear to appease France (Financial Times): in a fleeting moment of sense, Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has dropped its not so smart Nuclear policy. Germany is Europe’s industrial heart and needs baseload power not ideology for industry.
🔋CATL’s secondary offering in Hong Kong is 2025’s biggest public listing (Financial Times): the Chinese battery giant raised at least $4.6bn in a secondary listing, a rare bright spot for public markets that have been frozen after ‘Liberation Day’. CATL’s market cap is $170bn at the time of writing
🇬🇧 Building Sovereign Capabilities through Industrial Strategy (Centre for British Progress): a good policy proposal with some thoughtful suggestions on UK industrial policy. A policy I have also advocated for is deeper integration between government and the private sector in key strategic industries:
“The [UK] Government should establish a new joint No.10-HMT unit to identify and build strategic capabilities. Led by a new Prime Minister’s Adviser on Strategic Capabilities, the unit will identify 4-6 capabilities for urgent action, and allocate an approximately £8-9 billion budget to departmental taskforces to deliver these over this Parliament. Taskforces would operate with significant delegated authority, run by external chairs, staffed from industry and government, and with clear accountability to the centre of government”:
I’ll be back with the regular scheduling next week. If you enjoyed this post, please share it with a colleague!