Paul Maher

Well, here it is. Your next favourite podcast… Join Jonathan Simnett and I on episode 1 of The Difference Engine! Available now! Click the link in the comments 👇

Streatham-Croydon RFC has been a cornerstone of our community since 1871. They offer vital programs for children and youth, but now face closure due to rising costs. gofund.me/94f71774d

Why cutting the cost of living is not a Labour priority thetimes.com/article/6ec064…

Oracle sent 30,000 employees a 6 a.m. termination email last Tuesday. No call. No meeting. Just an email from “Oracle Leadership” and a system lockout. NetSuite dev teams and Customer Success were among the hardest hit. The AI teams? Largely spared. The company made $6.13B in profit last quarter — a 95% increase. They’re not cutting because they’re struggling. They’re cutting $8–10B in payroll to build AI data centers. Meanwhile, NetSuite customers who try to renegotiate renewals are seeing price increases as high as 28%. User licenses already jumped from $99 to $129/month. Fewer people supporting the product. Higher prices to use it. How confident are you in your NetSuite contract right now?

@sean_a_mcclure @BillAckman Bet you’re fun at dinner parties 😂

@BillAckman Remission ≠ cure Remission ≠ AI did it 1 person ≠ evidence Anecdote ≠ mechanism Data ≠ understanding No blueprint for complex disease

Incredible

🚨 WhatsApp’s “end-to-end encrypted” privacy is a total lie. New class-action lawsuit just dropped: Meta secretly let employees, contractors like Accenture, and third parties read, intercept, and store your private messages WITHOUT consent. All while marketing it as “only you and the recipient can read it.” Zuck lied to billions. Your chats were never safe.

The people’s party and fair play for all? Angela Rayner urged to pay tax on scandal legal advice thetimes.com/article/7f9684…

This is Walker Smith. After dedicating 17 years to Waitrose, he was recently dismissed. The reason? For attempting to stop a shoplifter nicking Easter eggs. Yes you read that right. He should be applauded, not sacked. Shameful @waitrose. Re-employ Walker Smith!

Euan Blair’s Multiverse may be frozen out of government training scheme thetimes.com/article/ee61d7…

THAT'S IT. THE UK HAS COLLAPSED. WE'RE DOOMED. Unilever has just sold the 124-year-old brand #Marmite ... to an American company.

@wholyv Axios hack, Claude source leak, and Oracle layoffs all in one day is genuinely a lot to process. The internet did not take it easy on us today.

“A gallon of jet fuel contains 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in a package weighing six pounds. A lithium-ion battery storing the same energy weighs 250 pounds. That density gap is why every military on earth runs on liquid hydrocarbons, why every container ship crossing the Pacific burns bunker fuel, why every combine harvester in Iowa runs on diesel, and why every 747 landing at Heathrow runs on kerosene. The fact that nobody wages war over solar panels is evidence of their limitations not superiority.” —@Shellenberger open.substack.com/pub/public/p/2…

BREAKING: EUROPE IS BACK IN THE AI RACE. A 3-year-old French startup just raised $830 MILLION to build the largest AI campus on the continent. 13,800 Nvidia chips. A campus powered by nuclear energy. And a $56 billion price tag. While America fights over tariffs and China hoards chips, Europe just made its move. And nobody is paying attention... Mistral AI was founded in 2023 by three researchers who left DeepMind and Meta. Arthur Mensch. Timothée Lacroix. Guillaume Lample. Three guys who decided Europe shouldn't have to rent its intelligence from Silicon Valley. In three years, they've raised over $4 billion across multiple rounds. Their September 2025 Series C alone was €1.7 billion. Led by ASML, the Dutch company that makes the machines that make every advanced chip on the planet. ASML took an 11% stake at an €11.7 billion valuation. Read that again. The company that controls the bottleneck of global semiconductor manufacturing just bet over a billion euros on a French AI startup. That's not a vanity check. That's a strategic signal. Now the $830 million in debt financing announced this week is earmarked for one thing: infrastructure. 13,800 Nvidia chips, likely Blackwell GPUs. A massive data center campus near Paris. Part of a broader 1.4 gigawatt project that, when fully built, would be Europe's largest AI campus. Total investment could reach €30 to €50 billion. Groundbreaking is planned for the second half of 2026. First operations by 2028. Partners include Nvidia, Bpifrance (France's sovereign investment bank), MGX (a UAE sovereign fund), Bouygues, EDF Group, and École Polytechnique. This isn't a startup building a product in a garage. This is a geopolitical infrastructure project disguised as a company. And here's what makes it different from every other AI fundraise you've seen: Nuclear power. France generates roughly 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy. AI data centers are the most power-hungry buildings on earth. Nvidia's next-gen chips consume more watts per rack than entire office buildings. In the U.S., companies are scrambling to secure power. Amazon is buying nuclear plants. Microsoft signed a deal to restart Three Mile Island. France already has the grid. While American AI companies fight over energy contracts and face community opposition to new natural gas plants, Mistral is plugging into a national nuclear infrastructure that already exists. Low carbon. Reliable. Scalable. That's not a small advantage. That's a structural one. Now let's talk about what Mistral actually builds. Their models compete directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Mistral Large 2 rivals GPT-4o in benchmarks. Their Mistral 3 family launched in December 2025. Revenue is projected to exceed $100 million annually. And unlike most American AI companies, Mistral's approach is open-weight. That means their models can be downloaded, modified, and deployed by enterprises without sending data to a third party. For European companies worried about data sovereignty, that matters enormously. GDPR. Data residency requirements. Regulatory compliance. European businesses can't always use American AI hosted on American servers governed by American law. Mistral offers them an alternative that keeps data on European soil. This is what "sovereign AI" actually means. Not a buzzword. A business model built on regulatory reality. And the timing couldn't be better. The global AI chip market is projected to generate over $1 trillion in revenue through 2026. Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has personally backed Mistral. There are reports of potential chip supply pacts worth up to $100 billion, similar to the deals Nvidia struck with OpenAI and Oracle. Meanwhile, U.S. export controls are tightening on China. The EU is positioning itself as the third pole in the AI race. Not by matching American spending dollar for dollar. That's impossible. But by leveraging what Europe actually has: nuclear energy, regulatory frameworks that force data localization, world-class research talent, and now, a company willing to build the infrastructure. Here's why this matters for investors: The AI trade has been almost entirely an American story. Nvidia. Microsoft. Google. Meta. Amazon. Five companies capturing the majority of AI investment returns. But the infrastructure buildout is global. And the companies supplying that buildout, like ASML, are already European. ASML's investment in Mistral isn't charity. It's vertical integration. If Mistral succeeds, it creates massive demand for the advanced chips that only ASML's lithography machines can produce. The AI supply chain doesn't start in Silicon Valley. It starts in Veldhoven, Netherlands, where ASML builds the tools. It runs through TSMC in Taiwan, where the chips get fabricated. And now it's being deployed in France, where the power grid can actually handle the load. Investors who only look at American AI companies are seeing half the picture. The other half is being built in Europe right now. Quietly. Methodically. With nuclear reactors and sovereign capital. Mistral raised $830 million this week. Most people scrolled past the headline. But the smartest money in Europe, sovereign wealth funds, national investment banks, the company that literally makes chip manufacturing possible, they all wrote checks. When the institutions that understand the AI supply chain better than anyone are betting on European infrastructure, that's not a feel-good story about innovation. That's a signal about where the next decade of value creation is heading. The AI race isn't one country's to win. It's infrastructure's to win. And the investors who build systematic exposure to that infrastructure, wherever it's being built, are the ones who capture the upside. Not by guessing which company wins. By building a system that doesn't miss the trend.

NHS chief on £279,000 has led three of England’s five worst hospitals thetimes.com/article/03d037…

OK, this is getting worse. The idea McSweeney just rang up the cops and reported the theft like an ordinary member of the public is nuts. It was a highly sensitive mobile. Why didn’t he report it to No.10 security, so they could ensure a proper investigation.

Is This Plausible? I am Morgan Macsweeney I am Chief Of Staff to the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland I hold a top-secret security clearance I own a mobile phone I use this phone to conduct Government Business I use this phone to message with Lord Mandelson My phone is tracked by GCHQ There are protocols for officials using personal phones to conduct Government business My communications are monitored to ensure they are not intercepted My phone is "stolen" a month after Lord Mandelson is sacked The police do not investigate The phone is not tracked down The police are too busy to track down the phone the most senior member of the Prime Minister's team - someone with a top-secret security clearance I do not contact my service provider to block the stolen phone I do not consider asking GCHQ to do this as a national security priority I do not ask for a replacement sim I do not buy a new phone I do not activate my new phone with the new sim I do not log-in to my Google account I do not select "Restore" I do not download WhatsApp I do not recover my messages Nobody, ever, who had their phone stolen was ever able to get their messages back. @UKLabour @Keir_Starmer DO YOU THINK WE ARE ALL STUPID? It is the cover-up that will take you down

🚨 Here is the full 40 minutes of my crew and I exposing California fraud, Minnesota was big but California is even bigger... We uncovered over $170,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters live in luxury with no consequences. Like it and share it, the fraud must STOP. We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for this to be happening. These fraudsters have been able to defraud American taxpayers for years without any pushback from the public and politicians. It is time to EXPOSE IT ALL and end America's fraud crisis.

Imagine having a nick name like ‘Health Insurance’? Poor Alan! Health insurance startup Alan reaches €5B valuation | TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2026/03/11/hea…

@opinion It’s neither vital nor wanted.

Heathrow airport's planned expansion is vital to the UK's economy. But such a costly endeavor demands caution bloomberg.com/opinion/newsle…