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
