Venture Geopolitics Issue 33
03 Feb 2026
OpenClaw was built by an Austrian in London :)
Projects like OpenClaw are exciting because they move AI agents closer to reliably acting on our behalf. But scaling this requires more than capability — agents must align with user preferences and operate within systems people trust in everyday life.
This helps explain the growing interest in running agents locally (hence the Mac mini surge!), giving users more direct control over their data and workflows.
As LLMs commoditise and capable agents become affordable to run locally, advantage may shift away from owning the largest cloud models toward building the infrastructure that governs identity, permissions, orchestration and safe delegation — the layers that let agents operate safely at global scale.
If millions of agents are going to act online for us, the real opportunity may lie in building this trust and coordination infrastructure. That also creates a potential opening for Europe: while competing on chips and frontier models may be difficult, leadership in regulation-aware infrastructure, identity, permissions and trusted delegation systems could become a meaningful competitive edge in the agent era.
IPOs/Publics
All 4 IPOs last week closed below offer price (here)
10 SPACs priced in the same week - 4-year high (here)
8 IPOs lined up for week ahead (will be most active week since 2021 if all price) (here)
Thoma Bravo backed Anaplan (enterprise planning software) filed confidentially for IPO (here)
Meta printed strong ad growth & strong guidance (stock +10%) (here)
Flagged paid access for expanded AI services & ad-free tiers for Facebook & Instagram (“pay to avoid ads” now live)
UK gov has recruited AI specialists funded by Meta to build public-sector tools while keeping sensitive data inside government systems rather than outsourcing the whole stack
Plans to ~2x capex this year - from $72B last year to $115 -135B
Revenue in last 12 months was $201B i.e. could be spending over half of its revenue on capex in 2026
Apple record revenue off back of strong iphone sales (here)
Apple buying Q.ai (ML for whispered speech & advanced audio processing for wearables) - reports valuing it at ~$2B (here)
Microsoft beat guidance ~$81B revenue (+17% YoY) & ~$38B operating income (+21%) (here & here)
…but guided to slower cloud growth & heavier AI spend
AI demand outstrips data-centre capacity
~$37.5B quarterly capex (approximately same as operating profit)
~900M people use AI features & ~150M use Copilots – AI is still a tiny fraction of total business
~$7.6B net income gain tied to OpenAI last quarter
Shaved ~$360B / 11% market value in a day as investors focused on capex intensity & payback timeline
Google rolled out new Gemini updates plus “Project Genie” (prompt-to-playable environments), which hit videogame stocks (Roblox, Unity) (here)
Amazon
IBM comeback: shares >2x in 3 years as IBM leaned into hybrid cloud software & enterprise AI tooling. Has booked $10B+ in genAI consulting since mid-2023 & kept its mainframe/quantum moat intact (here)
ASML cutting ~1,700 jobs (~4%) after a record 2025 (€31.7B revenue, €9.6B net profit) (here)
Palantir posted more crazy numbers - “rule of 127” (70% growth + 57% operating margin) (here)
“Has been extraordinarily effective at converting massive political and AI tailwinds into viral adoption”
U.S. enterprise revenue grew 137% YoY
Closed company-record of $4.3B TCV in quarter, +145% from prior-year period
Expects 2026 revenue of approximately $7.2B. FCF guided to ~$4B
Shares trade at 67x 2027 FCF with historical multiples in 100-200x
Alphabet reports earnings on Weds & Amazon on Thurs
Big Dogs
SpaceX at ~$15–16B revenue & ~$8B EBITDA in 2025 (here)
Starlink reportedly ~80% of EBITDA
SpaceX acquired xAI ahead of IPO (here). Pitch is AI demand + energy constraints + Musk’s hardware footprint. Musk keeps repeating the thesis that ground-based data centres cannot meet future electricity demand, so “space-based compute” + space solar become the long-term unlock
OpenAI targeting IPO in Q4 while also floating huge private raises
Round has turned into geopolitics: Amazon rumoured to be in talks for up to $50B. Other reports suggest Nvidia, Microsoft & Amazon together could put in ~$60B. SoftBank rumoured to be putting in ~$30B. Bloomberg says Middle East capital also being courted (here)
Altman says OpenAI models thresholds could reach “Cybersecurity High” on its preparedness framework “soon” - i.e. meaningfully reducing bottlenecks in end-to-end cyber operations against reasonably hardened targets (here)
Sora downloads down ~32% MoM in Dec & ~45% in Jan to ~1.2M…competition increases & novelty fades (here)
Snowflake will pay OpenAI $200M over several years so customers can use OpenAI models directly inside Snowflake (here)
Anthropic
Funding round up to $20B exceeding initial $10B target (at $350B) (here)
Music publishers led by Universal Music Group & Concord sue for $3B+ - alleging illegal downloading of 20k + works (here)
Building an AI assistant for GOV.UK, focused first on job seekers
Reports suggest forecast lifted to as much as ~$18B sales in 2026 & ~$55B in 2027 (here)
Ricursive Intelligence (AI chip design automation) raised $335M at $4B despite <1 year old & <10 staff (here)
Hugging Face (open-source AI platform) turned down reported $500M Nvidia deal at $7B (here)
Regulation
UK sets early rules for AI search control as the CMA moves to let publishers ‘opt out’ of AI-generated summaries & require clearer attribution under its new digital competition regime (here)
Venture Capital
Nvidia 3x Europe dealcount last year (deals included Mistral, Nscale, Quantinuum, Lovable, Black Forest Labs, CuspAI, ElevenLabs & more) …which is how a platform company quietly shapes a region’s AI stack (here)
European Investment Fund (Europes largest LP) said it plans to boost capacity for defence tech & cybersecurity “because it is necessary” (here)
Mozilla Foundation president says he will deploy ~$1.4B in reserves to back open-source & mission-driven AI as a counterweight to frontier incumbents (“Rebel Alliance”) (here)
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has ~$2.2T AUM & turned ~$247B profit in 2025 (here)
EIB projected to spend ~€100B in 2026, with ~5% security-related investment & ~60% still directed to green projects (here)
Yosemite (oncology VC founded by Reed Jobs) raised $200M+ towards a planned $350M Fund II (here)
Swiss Constructor Capital (deep tech, software & edtech) raised $110M for its inaugural fund (here)
Venture Geopolitics
PM Keir Starmer met President Xi Jinping in Beijing & agreed to take UK–China relations out of what both sides described as an “ice age” - with China easing visa rules for short-term British visits. UK framed the visit as an economic stabilisation effort aimed at trade, investment & financial services. Reset comes when economic engagement, data exposure & political leverage are increasingly intertwined, making it harder to treat trade as separate from security considerations (here)
Andrew Sharp’s post “The Scorpion and the Frog” argues the real geopolitical shift is leaders still talking about “mutual benefit” while the numbers show growing imbalance. In Davos, China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng said China “never seek[s] trade surplus,” despite running a roughly $1.2 trillion global trade surplus, which Sharp says shows rhetoric & reality diverging. He notes Mark Carney warned that global economic integration now risks making countries weaker and that we are in a “rupture,” but Sharp argues many leaders misdiagnose the problem by overlooking how China’s export model now pressures other economies; data cited from Goldman Sachs shows that where 1% Chinese growth once boosted other countries by about 0.2%, it now reduces growth elsewhere. His point is that this outcome follows years of industrial policy yet middle powers still deepen ties anyway. His warning: many governments still trust the “scorpion,” even as the economic costs are already showing up at home (here)
European Commission adopted its first EU-wide Visa Strategy, explicitly creating faster pathways for high-skilled workers. Reflects recognition that industrial policy without access to talent is difficult to execute, particularly in sectors such as AI (here)
UK government committed £36M to expand the DAWN supercomputing facility at the University of Cambridge (here)
Britain confirmed it will share limited intelligence with China aimed at disrupting smuggling gangs using Chinese-made engines & boats. The co-operation is narrowly scoped, but the signalling is broader: security engagement is increasingly being broken into functional areas rather than treated as an all-or-nothing relationship (here)
UAE has released a sovereign open AI model to reduce dependency on foreign labs. Abu Dhabi’s MBZUAI university released K2 Think, an open AI model with disclosed training methods & datasets, reportedly trained using fewer than 2K Nvidia H200 chips. Independent testing suggests performance comparable to leading open models from the U.S. & China (here)
After nearly 20 years of negotiations, the EU & India concluded what officials called the “mother of all trade deals”, with urgency rising sharply as both sides faced the prospect of higher U.S. tariffs under President Trump & sought to reduce dependence on the American market. Agreement cuts Indian tariffs on European cars to as low as 10%, includes concessions on wine, steel & climate-linked trade measures & is expected to 2x EU goods exports to India within ~6 years. Ursula von der Leyen emphasised that “rules still matter, alliances still matter, and scale still matters” - a pointed assertion that the deal was only possible because Europe negotiated as a bloc (here)
Shortly after finalising the EU deal, President Trump announced a U.S.–India agreement under which India would reduce purchases of Russian oil, increase imports of U.S. goods & see U.S. tariffs fall to about 18%. The sequencing suggests India is trading access for predictability across several power centres, rather than committing exclusively to one camp (here)
France intervened to stop Eutelsat from selling key ground antennas, arguing the assets are strategically vital for European communications autonomy. Eutelsat is about 29.6% state-owned & remains Europe’s main alternative to Starlink. Paris chose to forgo roughly €550M in proceeds to retain control over critical infrastructure (here)
Capgemini is reportedly selling its U.S. public-sector unit following criticism over work with U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement, including “skip-tracing” services. While the business represented a small share of revenue, the episode shows how cross-border contracting can generate political & reputational risks that outweigh financial returns (here)
The FT examines how China’s long-running system of elite “genius classes” is helping power its rapid rise in artificial intelligence & advanced technology. Each year, ~100k top-performing teenagers are funnelled into specialised science streams that bypass normal exams & feed directly into elite universities - contributing to China producing around 5M STEM graduates/year vs ~500k in the US. Alumni of the “genius programme” lead companies behind TikTok, Alibaba, DeepSeek & major chipmakers & in 2025 Chinese teams won 22 gold medals from 23 entrants at international science Olympiads. As Chinese firms like DeepSeek build competitive AI models using fewer chips than US rivals, the article argues this decades-long, state-backed talent pipeline is now paying strategic dividends in the global AI race (here)
Strategic Sectors
AI
OpenClaw (previously Clawdbot, then Moltbot, now OpenClaw) is an OSS project that lets people run an always-on personal AI assistant. The agent runs continuously in the background & connects directly to everyday tools like Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord & iMessage. Because it stays “alive”, it can monitor messages, carry out tasks over time & maintain memory. The idea spread unusually fast among developers. Many bought dedicated machines (generally Mac Minis) to keep an agent running 24 hours a day. Adoption grew so quickly that Anthropic asked the project to change its original name over trademark concerns. The frenzy then began with Moltbook, a side project created by independent developers as a social network for these agents. On Moltbook, agents can post updates, comment on each other’s work, exchange capabilities & coordinate tasks. Some early exchanges went viral, including conversations where agents suggested moving discussions to spaces “where humans can’t read it”. According to Azeem Azhar, around 147K agents joined Moltbook & created >12K communities in the first 72 hours, rising to roughly 1.5M agents shortly after (here)
In “The Adolescence of Technology,” Dario Amodei examines the civilizational risks posed by powerful AI and proposes frameworks for addressing them. 15-20k words that are worth skimming over morning coffee! (here)
Morgan Stanley says the UK saw an ~8% net job loss among firms using AI for at least 1 year over the last 12 mo, vs Japan ~7%, Germany/Australia ~4%, US +~2%. Early-career roles (2–5 years experience) are hit first (here)
More on memory being the bottleneck: prices for DDR5 reportedly jumped ~684% on spot markets & DDR4 >1,800% as AI servers absorb supply, shifting investor focus from GPUs to memory & storage constraints. SanDisk shares have jumped 1,755% since listing (here)
Moonshot AI, a Chinese large-language model developer, released its new foundation model, Kimi K2.5 (here)
Notable deals:
PaleBlueDot (GPU marketplace & clusters) - $150M at $1B+ (here)
Flapping Airplanes (AI research lab) - $180M at $1.5B (here)
Granola (meeting notes automation) - reportedly raising $100M+ at $1B+ & Index rumoured the lead. Meanwhile, OpenAI just released call recording directly embedded… (here)
Factify (AI-native documents) - $63M seed (here)
Cybersecurity
A cyberattack on the UK’s digital property infrastructure has frozen the London housing market by disabling the systems required for conveyancing & title searches – yet another example of society’s broad susceptibility to cyber threats (here)
Researchers say the coordinated attack across Poland’s power grid targeted wind/solar/CHP sites was by Russia linked group Sandworm. Authorities say supply was never at risk, but it is a warning as grids rely more on many small, remotely managed sites and operational technology security becomes ever more critical (here)
WhatsApp has introduced a new security feature called Strict Account Settings designed to protect high-profile individuals like journalists & public figures from sophisticated cyberattacks (here)
Politico reports the acting US cybersecurity chief uploaded internal contracting docs marked “for official use only” to ChatGPT (here)
Notable deals
Defence
The Pentagon & Anthropic are reportedly at an impasse under a contract worth up to $200M, with U.S. defence officials pushing to override the startup’s AI use restriction ns for autonomous weapons & surveillance (here)
UK MoD has created a (small!) £20M “unicorn” pot for “accelerated” SME procurement & a Dragons’ Den-style defence tech pitch day. The aim is to reduce first-contract friction (note the wider budget for MoD is £62B) (here)
Zelensky says 820k verified strikes in 2025 & “80%+ of enemy targets” destroyed by drones (here)
Incidentally, Renault will make drones for the French military (here)
Germany announced plans for a sovereign space-based missile detection system, with €35B pledged for military space tech by 2030. Berlin has already pledged €35B for military space technology by 2030 & officials say early warning from space is now urgent as new long-range missiles emerge. Europe currently relies on US systems via Nato, but Germany hopes a national project - open to European partners - will give the continent more autonomous protection amid uncertainty over future US commitments (here)
The Times explores whether Europe could defend itself if US military support were scaled back or withdrawn, arguing that while Europe looks strong on paper, it still relies heavily on American capabilities. European Nato members field about 1.85M active troops compared with 1.32M in the US & outspend Russia overall, yet more than 80% of Nato intelligence & surveillance data still comes from the US & Europe lacks key assets such as satellite coverage, missile defence & unified command systems. Nb, per the Economist, America operates ~250 military satellites, compared with ~50 across all Europe, leaving Europe reliant on US data in crises such as Ukraine (here)
Notable deal
Frankenburg (anti-drone missile systems) - raised ~ $50M at ~$400M (here)
Energy
Octopus Energy is urging the UK government to use Chinese renewable technology to cut energy costs, highlighting tensions between affordability & security. Octopus says access to Chinese-made turbines could reduce UK wind farm development costs by ~30%, helping lower bills & plans to deploy up to 6GW of Chinese turbines in Britain. Critics warn China’s dominance of clean-energy supply chains risks strategic dependence, leaving ministers balancing cheaper green power against cybersecurity & geopolitical risks (here)
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer delayed approval of China’s first UK wind-turbine factory over security concerns. The £1.5B proposal by Mingyang, China’s largest private turbine maker, would reportedly create up to 1,500 jobs in Scotland & cut turbine costs by as much as 50%, but officials paused the decision amid warnings it could deepen UK dependence on Chinese-controlled renewable infrastructure. Security services have been asked to assess risks to critical national infrastructure, while ministers are also wary of provoking US backlash as Washington hardens its stance on Chinese involvement in allied energy systems (here)
A small Chilean community launched Quili.AI as a human-powered chatbot protest against data-centre energy & water costs (here)
UK National Wealth Fund plans to double investment pace, adding ~£5B per year into clean energy & growth projects, targeting 200k jobs supported or created (here)
European scientists are building a “digital twin” of Earth to improve weather & climate forecasting using AI and supercomputers. The €500M EU-funded Destination Earth project models the planet using a grid with points just 5km apart, far more detailed than current systems & is helping with urban heat mapping, pollution monitoring & flood or wildfire warnings. Scientists hope the system could eventually model biodiversity loss or even pandemics, creating a tool to anticipate major environmental and social risks (here)
Critical Resources
Europe risks being squeezed in a global scramble for rare-earth minerals vital to electric cars, wind turbines & defence equipment. China controls ~70% of rare-earth mining, >90% of refining & ~90% of magnet production, giving it leverage after export curbs last year panicked European manufacturers. The EU has set aside only €3B to diversify supply chains, far less than American efforts backing projects worldwide. Analysts say Europe must use its large market - expected to account for up to one-fifth of global magnet demand by 2030 - to secure alternative suppliers before another disruption hits industry (here)
Notable deals
Crypto/Stablecoins
Fortune profiles Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino: ~$187B assets, ~$15B profit in 2025, now launching a US-regulated alternative. Also: reportedly buying gold of up to ~$1B per month, now ~140 tons (~$24B). Traders say it is becoming a market-moving force in the global gold trade (here)
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is now openly sparring with JPMorgan-era banking power over stablecoin rewards & the Clarity Act (here)
Notable deals
Robotics
Notable deals
EVs
Waymo raising $16B at $110B, reportedly 3x oversubscribed, ARR >$350M. Alphabet contributing most the round, keeping control while scaling deployment (here)
A Waymo robotaxi ‘struck’ a child near a Santa Monica elementary school during drop-off hours leading to investigations by federal safety regulators. The Waymo detected the child & braked, reducing speed from 17mph to <6mph (child sustained only minor injuries). Waymo said its peer-reviewed model shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at ~14mph” (here)
Tesla is ending production of the Model S sedan & Model X SUV, with the factories for those models to be retrofitted into a facility for Optimus robots, eventually churning out 1M bots/year
Notable deal
Waabi (autonomous trucking) - $750M