Musk v. Altman - UK Eats EU AI Act - SMRs Solve UK’s Energy Crisis?!

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.