France lands €110B in compute, as TSMC says it can't keep up

France secured more than €110 billion of proposed AI and data-center investment this week, the Financial Times reports — roughly 10 GW of new computing capacity, about what ten nuclear reactors put out. It's the latest sign that European capital is now competing directly for the same compute the US is racing to build.

TSMC says it can't meet US-led demand

Bloomberg via Techmeme

TSMC CEO C.C. Wei says the company won't be able to fulfill demand led by US customers, even as more capacity comes online in the US over the next few years. The capital is arriving faster than the fabs can.

SpaceX wins a tax exemption for its $55B Texas chip fab

Financial Times via Techmeme

SpaceX won a property-tax exemption for its planned $55B Terafab chip facility in Texas, over local opposition and the threat of legal action. The fight shows what it now costs a community to host a frontier fab.

Foxconn and Intel team up on AI server racks

Reuters via Techmeme

Foxconn says it will work with Intel to develop and deploy next-gen AI infrastructure, including server racks built around Intel Xeon processors and AI chips — another bet that the rack, not just the GPU, is where the next margin sits.

Anthropic profiled on its way to an IPO

Financial Times via Techmeme

A Financial Times profile of Anthropic as it prepares to go public and widen access to Mythos, set against criticism that commercial pressure has eroded the safety standards the company built its name on.

Nadella on Microsoft's AI position, MAI models, and OpenAI

Stratechery via Techmeme

A long Ben Thompson Q&A with Satya Nadella on the MAI models and the OpenAI relationship. It also runs through GitHub Copilot, Project Solara, and data centers — a rare on-record read of how Microsoft sees its own competitive position.

AI rivals jointly ask Congress for tougher bioweapon protections

The Verge

Several of the industry's biggest competitors set their grievances aside to push for stronger safeguards against using AI models to aid biological-weapon development — a rare case of the labs lobbying for their own constraints.

Can generalist agents automate data curation?

arXiv

Curating training data is one of the most consequential and labor-intensive parts of building a model. This paper introduces a benchmark and shows agents can take over key steps of that loop.

A diagnostic for agentic memory that generalizes across tasks

arXiv

Agent histories outgrow the context window fast. This paper diagnoses where agentic-memory systems fail to transfer across heterogeneous tasks and proposes a strong baseline.

Pre-deployment assurance for enterprise AI agents

arXiv

A method for verifying enterprise agents before they ship: ontology-grounded simulation and trust certification, aimed at regulated industries that can't deploy on vibes.

How mathematicians actually formalize proofs with AI

arXiv

A study of the first human-AI proof-formalization workflows — a close look at how high-level reasoning work shifts when a model sits in the loop.

Scarcity is driving AI innovation outside Silicon Valley

Rest of World

New AI infrastructure in India, Brazil, the UAE, and across Africa is being designed around compute scarcity rather than abundance — local stacks built to route around the bottleneck the rest of this issue keeps hitting.

How courts are coping with a flood of AI-written lawsuits

MIT Technology Review

A federal magistrate judge in Colorado now sifts through stacks of filings drafted by people without lawyers, leaning on AI. A ground-level look at what generative tools are doing to the courts.

AI and a new era of data colonialism

Axios

As AI reshapes how the world gathers information, critics argue it flattens cultural context and erases meaning for Indigenous groups and others whose data gets extracted but not represented.

Gemma 4 12B, uncensored, one-shots a retro coding task

r/LocalLLaMA

A local-models tinkerer hit refusals from the official 12-billion-parameter Gemma 4 at 8-bit, then ran the 'heretic' variant to one-shot a retro coding demo. A small data point on how uncensored local builds are being put to work.

“I was already getting refusals from the 8Q official model and decided to see how the heretic did oneshotting a retro”