The Briefing: Europe’s €15 Billion AI Infrastructure Sprint
The Briefing — Issue #2546.2 / November 12, 2025
Hi There 👋,
Europe just became Silicon Valley’s favorite construction site, and the numbers prove it. While tech giants scramble to retain their best minds, they’re simultaneously writing checks with more zeros than a developer’s test database to build out AI infrastructure across the continent.
The last 24 hours saw two of America’s largest tech companies commit a combined $16.4 billion to European data centers, making the region the epicenter of the next phase of AI expansion. Google dropped €5.5 billion ($6.4 billion) on Germany, while Microsoft pledged $10 billion to Portugal - creating what Brad Smith, Microsoft’s President, called an “AI factory” in Sines.
Google’s German expansion centers around Frankfurt, Europe’s largest data center hub, with a new facility in Dietzenbach and the expansion of the existing Hanau campus. The investment, spread from 2026 to 2029, is expected to support roughly 9,000 jobs annually and contribute €1.016 billion to Germany’s GDP each year. Beyond the headlines about computing power and cooling systems, there’s an interesting subplot: the company’s partnering with local energy provider EVO to capture excess heat from the Dietzenbach facility and warm over 2,000 households. Turns out AI training runs hot enough to replace your boiler.
Microsoft’s Portugal play might be even more strategic. The Sines location, 150 kilometers south of Lisbon, sits at the intersection of subsea cables connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas - making it a natural connectivity hub. The facility will deploy 12,600 of Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs through partnerships with Start Campus and British infrastructure firm Nscale. Portugal’s renewable energy capacity and favorable climate sweetened the deal, with Smith noting the investment exceeds all of Microsoft’s combined data center spending in neighboring Spain.
Both moves signal something bigger than quarterly capex announcements. Europe’s pushing hard to become a legitimate AI infrastructure player rather than just a regulation-happy spectator. Germany’s commitment to carbon-free energy targets and Portugal’s positioning as a digital crossroads between continents create compelling arguments for companies drowning in compute demand but wary of relying solely on domestic capacity.
When the Chief Scientist Becomes the Competition
While Microsoft and Google pour billions into European silicon, Meta’s losing one of its most valuable minds. Yann LeCun, the company’s chief AI scientist and a Turing Award winner, is reportedly planning to leave in the coming months to launch his own startup focused on “world models” - AI systems that develop an internal understanding of their environment rather than just pattern-matching text.
The timing tells its own story. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently reorganized the company’s AI efforts, creating Superintelligence Labs and bringing in 28-year-old Alexandr Wang from Scale AI (after a $14.3 billion investment) to lead the charge. LeCun, who previously reported to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, now reports to Wang - a structural shift that apparently didn’t sit well. The Financial Times reports LeCun’s already in early fundraising talks, betting that his vision for next-generation AI will find more receptive backing outside Meta’s increasingly product-focused walls.
LeCun’s not alone in the exodus. Meta cut roughly 600 positions from its AI research division in October, and multiple senior researchers have departed after the Superintelligence Labs restructuring. The message is clear: Zuckerberg’s trading long-term research bets for near-term product velocity, and researchers who built their careers on fundamental AI work are reading the org chart.
Speaking of reading org charts, or deciding they’re not worth the headache - xAI’s top lawyer Lily Lim departed after just 11 months with the company, including three months as chief legal officer. Her farewell note on X managed to be both gracious and revealing: “Even the best job ever with the universe’s best legal team for xAI’s frontier AI engineering geniuses does come to an end.” The real kicker came at the end: “Now that I’m not working 100+/hrs a week,” she noted, she’ll have time to swim or relax. Eleven months at xAI apparently count as multiple years in normal-person time.
In Other News
CoreWeave shares tumbled 16% after the AI cloud provider blamed “temporary delays related to a third-party data center developer who is behind schedule” for hurting Q4 revenue. Nothing says “growing pains” quite like your infrastructure partner missing deadlines while you’re trying to scale compute for the AI boom.
Apple is delaying the second-generation iPhone Air to work on a redesign that makes it more appealing to consumers. The refresh could include a second camera lens—addressing one of the main complaints from users who apparently want their ultra-thin phones to also be photography workhorses.
SoftBank Group reported a quarterly profit of $16.6 billion, more than double its previous figures, driven largely by exposure to OpenAI and related AI assets. Separately, the company sold its entire Nvidia stake for $5.83 billion—a move that freed up capital but came before Nvidia’s latest surge.
UBS Global Research forecasted the S&P 500 could hit 7,500 by the end of 2026, driven by an AI-led rally and resilient tech sector earnings. Wall Street’s now viewing AI as a long-term productivity driver rather than a hype cycle, which means everyone’s either right about the revolution or collectively wrong in spectacular fashion.
Swedish startup Lovable’s AI coding platform is approaching 8 million users, up from 2.3 million in July, with CEO Anton Osika reporting the platform now supports around 100,000 new “products” built daily. Natural-language coding tools are transitioning from novelty to infrastructure more quickly than most expected.
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