Pedro Henriques

Bootstrapped, fast-growing, profitable. Founder & CEO @BRIDGE_IN_COM, father of 3. Anti-bureaucracy tech optimist building proof Europe can still win.

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

Google is renting compute from SpaceX. Who knew.
It follows Anthropic. Both leasing GPUs from Colossus, the cluster xAI built to train Grok, now a SpaceX asset.
SpaceX prices its IPO this Friday at 1.75 trillion dollars. The largest in history.

Google is, by some counts, the largest single owner of AI compute on earth. Its own chips, its own data centers, more than 180 billion dollars in capex this year. And it is still paying an AI competitor 920 million dollars a month for Nvidia GPUs, because demand for Gemini ran ahead of what Google could build in time.

The scarce thing in 2026 is no longer the model. It is power. Whoever stands up gigawatts fastest sets the terms. SpaceX did not win this on a better model. Grok leads nothing, and the company loses billions a quarter. It won on execution at the physical layer. Concrete, transformers, racks, megawatts.

Now look at Europe.
We have a 200 billion euro plan, 19 AI factories, and a regulation number for all of it. What we do not have is one operational cluster anywhere near this scale. The largest sites on European soil run on American money and American chips.

I really hope the full plans for the Sines datacenter come through, 1.2 GW would mean something for Portugal.
Let's go @Start_Campus

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

And so it begins.
The AI private-market party is about to meet public price discovery.

- SpaceX IPO hits this week
- Anthropic & OpenAI up next
- Banks won't price OpenAI stock as collateral for SoftBank's loan
- Google issuing $85B in stock while sitting on $127B cash

This is starting to smell like the party is ending, and someone gets left holding the bag.

But I won't bet against Elon. SpaceX is the most exciting company ever. I'm a buyer just after initial price discovery.

[Reuters @Reuters]

SoftBank's attempt to get $6 billion OpenAI margin loan stalls, Bloomberg News reports https://t.co/kgpdP8R5tE https://t.co/kgpdP8R5tE

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

Bank of Portugal today...

Absolutely nothing works in this country during the silly season.
The engineer who keeps their infra alive with duct tape must be on summer holidays.

Let's just close down the country and go to the beach. Grab a drink until we all collectively lose enough brain cells to think this is normal. 🍻

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

@SICNoticias Even thought @RTPNoticias didn’t compromise with numbers they seem to have mixed median with average. As the recent news from BoP was about median

https://t.co/QPz3hiM16R

As I said, lack of financial literacy in Portugal is dramatic

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

Financial literacy in Portugal sucks.

Quick public service note after a salary story this week. I need to flag journalists at @SICNoticias for a non-negligible error. Accuracy matters.

I do this for a living, explaining salaries and taxes to foreign companies. Didn't expect to do it for local news.

Median means the middle. Half the workers earn below it, half above. To compare the minimum wage to the median, both have to be measured the same way. Both gross, or both net.

The story gave the minimum wage as gross (870€) and then called the median net (984€). Gross and net are not the same thing. Gross is before Social Security and tax. Net is what lands in your account. You can't put one against the other and call it a ratio.

The finding underneath is fine, and it comes from the @bancodeportugal. Measured properly, gross against gross, the minimum wage is close to 91% of the median. That compression is the real story, and it's worth a serious conversation, without errors.

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

@SICNoticias Source article in PT-pt: https://t.co/bjQIt8JWDz

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

Probably because the EU Commission exerts its power when it forbids, not when it enables.

But Portugal does not need Brussels for this. Denmark, Lithuania, and Estonia have just recognized the Dutch approval nationally. IMT could do the same. Could. Probably not worth keeping expectations high on that one.

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

Every time a US tech company ships a big new feature, I go from excited to annoyed in about a day, because I know how this ends for us.

This time it is Siri AI. EU iPhone and iPad users will not get it at launch.

Apple and Brussels are busy blaming each other, and the real story is probably messy on both ends.
I do not care much whose interpretation of the text wins.
I care that this is the second time in two years European users get the downgraded default, and that the cost of the standoff lands on us, not on Cupertino and not on the Commission.

Whatever the legal merits, the result is the one we keep getting here.
Europe is where the headline feature shows up last, on the device you use most, and nobody inside the fight is the one waiting for it.

We can do better than this.
I am not giving up on Europe. But I will keep voting against the people who treat overregulation as a default setting.

[European Commission Audiovisual Service @EC_AVService]

Apple decided not to roll out SIRI AI in the EU.
The non-interoperability of their design made the update not suitable for the EU market.

Why? Because big tech companies cannot decide which EU tool should be used by EU citizens.

Learn more👇
📺https://t.co/idWk7bGcs2

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

I run a company that helps people survive this machine. I'd happily put us out of business if it meant nobody had to ask the State for permission to sell breadsticks.

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

Imagine you work at the Tax Authority. You get home. Your kid asks about your day.

"Hi dad! How was work?"
"Busy. Important stuff."
"Did you catch someone dodging taxes?"
"Not today. Today we decided whether breadsticks are bread."
"...what does that have to do with taxes?"
"A company wanted to sell them cheaper. So the State had to officially rule whether a breadstick is legally bread."

This actually happened. Portugal, this week. A binding ruling, on the ontology of breadsticks.

Every hour the country spends adjudicating snack taxonomy is an hour nobody spends building anything.

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

Source in PT-pt: https://t.co/YAzEIvSCIf

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

The people who wrote the EU Pay Transparency directive don't believe in the free market.

The deadline to turn it into national law was last weekend. Most of Europe missed it.

2/27 countries fully made it. The rest are late, stalling, or, in the case of Sweden and Estonia, refusing outright.

This isn't a Brussels-versus-the-members story. The fragmentation is its own mess. My problem is the rule itself.

@BRIDGE_IN_COM operates in Portugal, Spain, and Italy. We'll comply as it gets transposed into local law, and we'll help our customers do the same. That doesn't mean I give up the right to criticise it. We're in a democracy. You exert your rights, or you lose them.

To me, this is one more step in bureaucratic overreach. A body in Brussels decided it gets a say in how a private company structures pay. I don't accept the premise.

This isn't about pay discrimination. That's already illegal, and it should stay illegal. The problem is the 2nd order effects of good intentions.

Once a company has to defend every pay gap to an auditor, the safe move is to stop having gaps. Businesses compress the bands and stop paying their best people visibly more, because now every exception is something to justify on paper. A law written to protect fairness ends up protecting sameness and fostering mediocrity. I don't accept that as an outcome.

Put people in a box, in a pay band, and you start from a premise of averageness.
The whole entrepreneurship game is the opposite: find the exceptional, the outliers, the people worth far more than the band, and pay them like it.
Well-intentioned or not, a law that works against that is anti-competitive, philosophically anti-free-market, and ends up anti-success.

A Commission that, rightly, never stops talking about European competitiveness keeps pushing laws that produce less of it. Some countries are starting to realise that.

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

@tiagopita @maximnovak With the proliferation of AI-enables services and AI accounting wrappers for individuals and micro companies. The fair value will either trend to zero, out of infinite competitors. Or it will go up as the old-style accountants will need to fix vibe accounting.

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

@OfficialLoganK Just spent several days finding workarounds to generate Google Slides with Gemini. This is a much-anticipated feature.
Is this available worldwide? I have Gemini Pro, not Ultra. and don't seem able to use it

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

PS: We need more tokens! If you come to Portugal, please make a special deal for 🇵🇹 #Startups like @BRIDGE_IN_COM. We'd appreciate it! 🙌

#AI #Sines #Tech #Innovation #Claude

(6/6)

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

Anthropic in Portugal! 🇵🇹

Everyone in #tech is following the Pentagon's blacklisting of @AnthropicAI, a move usually reserved for foreign adversaries.

This follows @DarioAmodei non-negotiable red lines:
👁️ No mass surveillance
🔫 No fully autonomous lethal weapons

(1/6)

[Pedro Henriques @p3dromig]

🌊 Ocean-Cooled Compute: Sines uses seawater cooling (zero freshwater needed).

⚖️ Stability: A democracy that won't penalize a company for ethical lines.

Imagine Claude, powered by the Atlantic sun & cooled by the ocean!

🥹 One can always dream.

(5/6)