Jensen Drops a Trillion - Hyperscalers Go Broke - & Some Guy Cures Cancer with ChatGPT

Every week on Upside, we try to unpack the news that's going to affect European venture, start-ups and investing. If you're a founder, GP, or LP, this is the show for you to catch up on the week's shenanigans.Hosted by Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen, and Lomax Ward, all European venture capitalists. 00:00 — Nvidia's GTC: Jensen Drops a Trillion-Dollar Bomb Three new chips announced, each more ridiculous than the last. The Groq inference chip does 35x tokens per watt. Vera Rubin does 10x Blackwell. And the Feynman chip (2028) stacks silicon on silicon like a semiconductor lasagne. Marginal improvements these are not.04:38 — Star Cloud: Data Centres in Space, Because Why Not A seed-stage startup founded by an English bloke gets its video played at the biggest GPU conference on earth. The lads are impressed. Dan remains "not sold" but concedes it's "a lovely story." Literal moonshots, baby.07:54 — Is Nvidia a Buy? (This Is Not Investment Advice™) Mads runs the numbers: Nvidia trades at 21x forward earnings, basically the S&P average, except the S&P doesn't grow 73% a year. Bull case: it's cheap. Bear case: three of its biggest customers are building competing silicon. Classic.12:00 — The AI Lab Business Model Hunger Games OpenAI kills side gigs and panics into enterprise. Anthropic does a Palantir cosplay with Blackstone. Mistral quietly shows up with a billion-dollar run rate. Mads says without consumer monetisation, OpenAI is "toast." Dan doesn't buy the ad model. Lomax says think outside the box. 20:42 — Norway's $2.2 Trillion Fund Manager Is Spooked Nikolai Tangen says markets are sleepwalking past the Iran risk and an AI bubble could vaporise 35% of his fund. Amazon is free cash flow negative for the first time since the Clinton administration. Alphabet's FCF is down 90%. Meta's is near zero. The hyperscalers went from the greatest cash machines ever built to borrowing money for GPUs. Meanwhile Apple sits at the bottom of the CapEx chart, vibing.30:00 — A Man, His Dying Dog, and ChatGPT Sydney tech founder uses ChatGPT + AlphaFold + a university lab to build a custom mRNA cancer vaccine for his rescue dog. Lomax provides the necessary reality check (the dog still has cancer) but admits personalised medicine is coming, just give it 20-30 years. Meanwhile DeepMind can't define AGI and is paying researchers $200K to help them figure it out.41:00 — Google Stitch: Vibe Design & Lovable's Nightmare Google coins "vibe design" (jury's out on whether that sticks) and launches a free AI design canvas that ships code straight to MCP. Lovable's head of growth already said her biggest fear is platforms with distribution. Lovable responds by pivoting into... everything? The internet is not impressed.45:49 — Rachel Reeves Discovers Non-Competes Are Bad The Chancellor uses the Mais lecture to announce non-compete limits, £500M for sovereign AI, and £2B for quantum, including actually buying quantum computers from UK companies. Then she mentions £13.8M for quantum research hubs and the mood deflates slightly.50:10 — EU Inc: Europe's Delaware (Pending Lobbying Apocalypse) The EU wants 48-hour company formation, under €100, no notary. Andreas Klinger's movement becomes official policy. The gang gives it a 50/50 chance of surviving the legislative sausage factory. Lomax notes that even Delaware made him send a fax, so maybe the bar is lower than we thought.53:33 — Travis Comes Out of Stealth (Not the Band) The Uber founder resurfaces after eight years of cloud kitchens with "Atoms" - a physical AI company targeting food, transport, and mining. The combination makes zero obvious sense but nobody wants to bet against the man who built Uber. Fair.