Alex Portz

VC & growth @ QIA | Semis & AI infra | Ex-@oxfordchemistry

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

Google and Microsoft upwards revising AI infrastructure capex yet again

Further big moves pushing combined for the group over $1tn annually

[Midnight Capital @Midnight_Captl]

Data from Altimeter:

Morgan Stanley now projecting $GOOG to spend $299B on CapEx next year up 57% from $190B this year

The biggest revision to previous estimates by a country mile.. $MSFT. CapEx est. revised from $178B to $276B in 2027 🤯

Hyperscaler CapEx now est. >$1.1T

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@umajaa I am from the UK… And A/C or some form of temp control is needed in European countries given the summers are getting hotter!

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

European elites lie to themselves by claiming the US only works for the top 0.1%, but many of them have never been to the Midwest, Florida or Texas etc. They only know NYC, SF, Boston etc.

The life of American families with decent jobs in these parts - spatious house, multiple cars, BBQs every weekend, loads of leisure pursuits for adults + kids, national parks etc. - economically and lifestyle wise dwarves what a large part of Europe offers. Life is great there 😊

Not saying the US is perfect, there are well discussed drawbacks. But the compounding effect of a more dynamic and individualistic economy can’t really be ignored.

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

European football fans visiting America are discovering the mass affluence of the country’s suburbs. The wealth enticing holidaymakers troubles European elites. America, once a peer, seems to be racing ahead https://t.co/L3lw48WEwo

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@another07047584 @Barney_H_Y It’s such governance seppuku - why oh why are they behaving like this!
The inc tax thresholds need to be raised by far and 45p vans scrapped, and efforts made to attract the internationally mobile again

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

Less economic seppuku please 🙈

UK tech is actually a real bright spot of the economy. It needs to be fed and turned into a proper growth engine.

Let’s make it the most internationally attractive place for builders to create and grow their companies.

[Barney Hussey-Yeo @Barney_H_Y]

From a very credible Labour source:

- Wes Streeting promised the Chancellorship for not running.

- Capital gains raised to match income tax. Possible exit tax.

- Economic focus: devolution, plus state ownership of cost-of-living essentials (energy, water, transport).

- Nothing on AI or tech, bar higher capital gains and an EIS/SEIS-style relief for backing British businesses. (Spoiler: startups now incorporate in Delaware and raise on SAFEs. I’ve done 60+ angel investments; only two were eligible.)

Andy and Wes don’t seem to grasp that tech has been the core engine of growth for 20 years, and AI will only accelerate that.

So why would any founder build here? How does the UK compete with the US and China on AI? Where does growth actually come from?

The world economy is changing fast, and we need to be ready to thrive in it, not just survive.

I really hope this admin appoints some figures who actually get what’s happening. Losing business support early, from a disastrous first budget, was the beginning of the end for Starmer.

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@Panserhjerte @Darkheyr Clearly I mean top 10% for both so it’s apples to apples

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@Darkheyr I am from the UK man, genuinely top 10% of society in US live way better than most UK folks. It’s not universally true ofc. And am not saying US is perfect - clearly it isn’t

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@nielsen_pe50582 Northern Europe is the European way done properly my friend :)
Higher taxes = wonderful public services there largely

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@kmj2190 It’s definitely not perfect - Europe is better for bottom half for sure. Maybe too good though…

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@kmj2190 We aren’t discussing the median, top 5-10% sort of thing

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@kmj2190 Fair point - I love Spain too, but many middle class Americans could easily have a summer place there too, vice versa doesn’t work though

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@aporia9n So so true - my dad is from Michigan (which is economically doing poorly vs rest of US and southern / red states) and even there it is a noticeable step up vs UK

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

Bring on supersonic air travel.

About time to correct for the unacceptable step back with Concorde retirement.

Reminder: Concorde was introduced 50yrs ago in 1976 and finished in 2003

If someone had told you aviation would have been slower 50yrs later in 1976, it would have been a laughable suggestion.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

Britain is preparing to test a hypersonic space plane that could help cut London to Sydney flying times to just three hours.

The Invictus aircraft, being developed by the European Space Agency and backed by the UK Space Agency, would travel at Mach 5 – more than 3,800 mph and five times the speed of sound ⤵️
https://t.co/zRempveu6B

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

Excited to share we are backing Hyperlight in its $80m Series C.

Hyperlight is the leader in TFLN modulators - across hyperscaler data centres, telcos, and quantum - as the industry moves from 200G to 400G per lane, and from pluggables to NPO/CPO.

First met Mian the founder back in 2021 and glad to be on the journey.

CC @MediaTek @SummitPartners @FoothillVenture @XoraInnovation

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

True. Good article.
Joining well qualified startups - can give you vastly asymmetrically skewed opportunities to the upside.

Must haves:
1) super high team talent caliber
2) credible investor backing
3) confiction they are solving a valuable problem
4) personal excitement - enough to fuel for years, even when it's hard

The far greater risk is not giving yourself the chance to hit it big multiple times as employee or founder in your career.

If it all blows up, generally there is little downside and the skills, agency, network, hustle you learn can serve you very well anywhere in future.

[Calvin Chen @calvinchen]

https://t.co/KBzJKTs6Xb

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@BessemerVP Are you guys kidding?!
This is 2-3 years late and fairly generic like it came from ChatGPT directly

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

@hkanji @stanboland Phenomenal stuff - this needs to be put into action fully and urgently

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

Just wow 😮

[Taelin @VictorTaelin]

this is my personal singularity moment

this post may sound like a paid ad. I only wish. I'm concerned, more so than happy. the world is changing, and, among the scenarios where AI goes terribly wrong, inequality is the most realistic, yet, the one Anthropic seems to be the least concerned about. I'm glad OpenAI is taking the opposite stance: *personal AGI for everyone*. I think this is a commendable position in the times we live. but who am I in the queue of the bread?

anyway, Fable is here, so I'll just report my first-hour experience

first of all, all my pet prompts are solved.
→ λ-calculus puzzles
→ bug questions
→ one-shot apps
all are trivial to it.

I don't have anything harder other than my
ongoing work

so, in the last several days, I've been toying with HVM5, a new interaction net evaluator with a faster loop.

after writing the first version, I left 32 GPT-5 agents working for ~20 hours each. this resulted in up to 2x speedups, but the file size increased by 2-fold and quality decreased significantly.

I then simplified the whole thing into an even simpler core, and left Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 optimizing it for 8 hours. Opus got a legit 6% - 34% speedup in most benches. GPT got better results, but, sadly, an unusable file.

I then asked Fable to optimize it.

2 hours later, it landed a 1770% speedup in one case, 100%+ in other 4, and 22% in average. yes, in 2 hours it outperformed me, opus 4.8 and a swarm of gpt 5.5 agents, by one order of magnitude.

that could not possibly be legit. "it must be hardcoding the benchmarks" (GPT trauma). so I read its explanation and what it did was, indeed, the most high impact optimization one could try first. seems like HVM5 was wasting a lot of time garbage-collecting unused branches of pattern-match nodes. I had optimized that for static mats, but not for dynamic mats. skill issue. Fable figured how to do it for these, resulting in a massive speedup in some benches

but wait, is that *correct*? I'm not sure yet, it is credible, but this is the kind of thing that is very easy to get wrong on interaction nets. the problem is, when I was ready to start auditing Fable's solution so I could tell whether it was buggy or legit, it interrupted me to tell me it had found a massive bug on the code *I* had written.

... wait, what?

so... for garbage collection purposes, I stored a bit on lambda term pointers that meant "the variable bound by this lambda has been freed, so, its lambda must free whatever argument it is applied to". that's fine. yet, on duplicator nodes, I also used the same bit to mean "one of the duplicated variables was freed, so, treat this dup as a passthrough no-op". so, if a lambda entered a duplicator, it would mistake the lambda's collection bit for its own, resulting in corrupted interaction!

that's a mouthful, why I'm writing this?

just so you can appreciate the sheer absurdity of what just happened. I didn't ask it to find bugs. I asked it for an optimization. and even if I did ask it to find bugs, this bug is so astonishingly subtle and specific, identifying it takes mastering the domain to an extent that it beyond even me. I'd easily need hours or days to fix it, *if* I ever came across it. chances are it would just go unnoticed. and Fable found it and fixed it like it was nothing, while it was busy adding a 17x speedup to a file that neither I, nor Opus 4.8, nor a fleet of GPT 5.5 managed to barely make 2x faster.

oh and there is also another tab where it is also ripping through Bend's codebase and finishing everything I had to do

I don't know what to say anymore

this isn't about Anthropic or OpenAI, this is about our collective future as a species. the world is changing, and we need to be aware of it, and discuss how to handle this change.

receipt below . . .

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

Notable U-turn from Benchmark

I mean why would you not, especially if it is largely to support breakout portfolio companies with larger tickets later on.

You don’t need a much larger team, it is not 20x the work to write a $100m Series C/D ticket vs. a $5m Seed one.

Institutionalisation of venture continues.

[Kate Clark @KateClarkTweets]

Scoop: Benchmark has raised $2 billion across two new funds, including its first growth fund, a big shift for a firm that spent decades defending a smaller, focused approach to venture investing. Details here:
https://t.co/bhikTRE3HI

[Alex Portz @AlexMP_1]

Hey @UKLabour - kindly read this

Success in science/technology and growth are the way

Not squeezing your general population and founders/wealth creators

[Marco De Donno @stonksandgoats]

@citrini What it means for the Korean economy and people when Samsung and SK Hynix are about to pay $430 BILLION in taxes in FY26-28.

That's half the Korean public debt.