Michael Grant

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

@adiix_official Apple’s new Mac Mini M5 Pro with 128gb is likely to cost around $2500 if historical pricing holds. How is this AMD box, which costs closer to $3500, even remotely competitive?

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

@NatPurser @DavidSacks Perhaps you had pistol Pete should get your stories straight?

[Malek Ould-Oulhadj @malekoo]

https://t.co/zQCE2uyQP8

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

@DrJStrategy "...a deal is near". Where have I heard that before I wonder? 🤔

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

@JavierBlas Never have two words - “if true” - done more work to support an argument.

[Uncle Milty’s Ghost @his_eminence_j]

And now for the single dumbest thing you’ll read all day.

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

Another distorted take on what is actually happening. First Apple doesn’t hold a grudge against Nvidia and they haven’t for a long time. Apple hasn’t been building computers where Nvidia is even relevant for years. As it relates to AI the only reason that Apple is using Nvidia Blackwell is because Google can’t commit enough TPU to apples deployment. Hence Google‘s recent order for mega quantities of TPU‘s. As soon as those TPU come online, I expect we’ll see a phase down of apple’s use of Nvidia chips for cost reasons if nothing else. Purely pragmatics.

[Kay Jebelli 🇺🇦 @KayJebelli]

*Scene 232, some time in 2025*

APPLE: Can we release Siri AI?

EC: Sure, if you want to get fined under the DMA

APPLE: How can we comply with the DMA?

EC: Give third-parties access to all the private data on Apple phones so that they can compete with you.

APPLE: But we can't do that, it would invade our users' privacy, and it's a violation of our brand promise.

EC: Then Siri AI won't be compliant with the DMA.

APPLE: How about if we give them access to a "Trusted System Agent", middleware that would allow competing virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI?

EC: That's not equal access to everything you have access to, we want you to share everything, for free, that's what we think the DMA demands.

APPLE: I'm not sure that's what the text says, are you sure we can't talk about this? We don't even know if that's technically possible. We designed Siri AI to work with our systems, our private cloud, and on-device processing, we don't know how to provide the same access to third-parties from the jump. It's going to take time.

EC: That's fine, you can take your time, but if you launch in Europe we'll fine you.

APPLE: Can we start with the Trusted System Agent, and then figure out how to give you everything you want, that is technically possible, and in a privacy preserving way, over the next 18 months?

EC: Nope. EU law is non-negotiable.

APPLE: Really? That sucks, we don't want to Abandon our European users.

EC: That's Apple's decision, and Apple's only.

[Dr. Lars Henrik Andersen 🇪🇺 @EUAITaxonomy]

The Siri/EU situation is a regulatory masterpiece.

Apple cannot launch Apple Intelligence in the EU.

Why? Because under the DMA, if Siri gets deep system access, every other AI assistant must get the exact same. Anything less would be unfair competition. A gatekeeper privileging its own service.

So either Siri ships and every Shenzhen startup, Cyprus shell company, and nephew hackathon project gets identical root access to 450 million Europeans’ digital lives or nothing ships.

Apple proposed a “Trusted System Agent”: a security intermediary so third-party assistants get capabilities without ripping the phone wide open.

The EU rejected it.

Magnificent.

Apple’s response: fine, then no developer APIs either. No Apple Intelligence, no third-party integrations, no foundation model access for EU developers. The entire layer simply does not exist on this continent.

Excellent.

This is the path. Why depend on American AI when we can build the entire stack ourselves? A European foundation model, trained on a European GPU cluster, running on a European OS, on a European phone, manufactured in a European fab, powered by European nuclear plants we have spent fifteen years closing.

Estimated time to ship: 2047.

Estimated cost: the GDP of three member states.

Estimated outcome: a chatbot that requires a cookie banner before each response.

Worth it.

In the meantime, European users are protected from Apple processing data Apple already holds by ensuring nobody processes anything at all.

Not a bug. The intended outcome.

Regulatory product design with a sledgehammer, swung with precision.

🇪🇺

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

@DrJStrategy This guy must have gated liquidity and needs the balloon to stay inflated a bit longer.

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

@_simonsmith LOL. OpenAI having competitive hardware in this timeframe is ridiculous.

[Max Weinbach @mweinbach]

Gemini DOES NOT power Siri

Apple foundational models power Siri

Those models are based on Gemini technology.

It is not Gemini.

Apple and Google have been clear about this since January.

[dustin curtis @dcurtis]

The new Siri in iOS 27 is incredible—it works almost flawlessly with even ridiculously complex asks. Well worth the two years of waiting while Apple figured it out. Almost no notes. Both the design and functionality are as good as I could have hoped for.

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

@PatrickMoorhead @tim_cook It's strategic marketing positioning 101. So, yes it's really all the other players doing nerdy AI stuff vs Apple doing AI for real people in their everyday lives.

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

Maybe I slightly exaggerated but you said this: "Real edge, though a bit rich while the heaviest Siri queries run on Gemini on Google’s cloud". The Siri runs on Gemini is the part I objected to and I believe is misleading to the casual reader. It's really Apple running Apple's new Foundation Models on Google infrastructure and that difference is meaningful. Apple basically renting Google Cloud like any other cloud customer.

[Norman Ornstein @NormOrnstein]

Dear Scott Pelley: pull the entire 60 Minutes team together and go to MSNow and offer a package deal to recreate the show for Sunday night and call it The Hour

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

This take will age very poorly. Well, true that Apple fumbled the ball with their own upgrades to Siri over the last two years, it’s also true that Apple has avoided hundreds of billions of Expenditures to field a Frontline frontier model. And the economics of that business are being called into question now. Apple may have dodged a huge bullet in its own miss handling of Siri. It’s allowed them time to develop more advanced AI capable chips that run on device AI models much more efficiently and effectively. And local models themselves are increasing in capabilities sufficient to handle many if not most of the average workloads that computer and phone users are going to have. And Apple can pass more sophisticated needs to Google’s cloud without sending all of the workloads to that same cloud. So you have it in some ways backwards. The moat, as you discuss it, is increasingly on device intelligence running local models that are increasing in capabilities covering 80+ percent of workloads, whether agentic or not, and the cloud will handle the other 20% of needs, but the entire cloud based AI data infrastructure financial model is on the verge of collapse.

[Michael Grant @michaelgrant]

@CaptainRoyen So what is the implication here then? Yes, CA inventory is tightening, but can’t CA just import more refined stock from other western states?

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Today the EU made American AI illegal in 27 countries.

The reason is ONE sentence Microsoft's own lawyer said under oath:

This morning in Brussels, EU Tech Chief Henna Virkkunen unveiled the Cloud and AI Development Act. It's the most aggressive anti-American tech move from Europe since GDPR.

The law forces EU public sector procurement in banking, healthcare, defense, and energy to apply mandatory non-price factors favoring software and hardware built inside the EU. Microsoft Azure can be cheaper, AWS can be faster, Google Cloud can have the better model, and EU governments MUST legally prefer European alternatives.

AWS, Microsoft, and Google currently control roughly 70% of the European cloud market. Brussels is now openly targeting greater independence from US providers in cloud, AI, and semiconductors.

The largest regulatory market-share transfer in tech history is being written into law right now.

But the real story is how this happened...

On June 10, 2025, a man almost no one outside Brussels had heard of walked into the French Senate. His name is Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France.

Senator Dany Wattebled asked him under oath whether he could guarantee that data belonging to French citizens, stored on Microsoft European servers, would never be transmitted to US authorities without explicit consent from the French government.

Carniaux answered honestly. He admitted he could not guarantee it, because Microsoft must comply with the US CLOUD Act regardless of where European data physically sits. One sentence of sworn testimony from Microsoft's own counsel killed every sovereign cloud defense Big Tech had spent five years building.

It became the legal foundation for the law unveiled today.

Then Trump accelerated the divorce.

January 2025 brought executive orders expanding US surveillance authorities. Vance went to Munich and attacked European democracies on stage.

The tariffs followed and so did the Pentagon's $200 million AI contract war that ended with OpenAI replacing Anthropic after Hegseth labeled it a supply chain risk. So did OpenAI's Stargate and yesterday's Trump AI Executive Order, whose Section 3 lets the White House pick which AI companies get 30-day early access to frontier models. American AI was officially declared a US government strategic asset.

Europe heard every word of it.

On May 12, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch told the French National Assembly that Europe had 24 months to build sovereign AI infrastructure or become a permanent US VASSAL state.

And the response came fast:

April 24: Cohere acquired Germany's Aleph Alpha for $20 billion with both Germany's and Canada's digital ministers in the room at the Berlin announcement. May 30: SoftBank committed up to $87 BILLION for French nuclear-powered data centers, the largest AI infrastructure project in European history.
Yesterday: EU Parliament announced it's dropping Google for French search engine Qwant tomorrow. France ordered every government workstation off Windows and onto Linux.

Today the Cloud and AI Development Act made all of it law.

- Mistral is building a 1.4 gigawatt AI campus near Paris by 2028 with Nvidia, MGX, and Bpifrance
- SAP's EU AI Cloud, launched last November, runs on Cohere, Mistral, and SAP's own sovereign infrastructure
- McKinsey forecasts $600 billion in sovereign AI needs by 2030

None of that money is going to Silicon Valley.

The America First AI policy built a wall around the world's most regulated economy, and American companies are on the wrong side of it.

Microsoft's lawyer told the truth in a Senate hearing nobody watched. Trump turned that admission into a national security narrative while the EU turned that narrative into procurement law.

And one entire continent walked away from the American tech stack...