Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face — the “GitHub of AI” — for $12.9 billion. If it holds, the company controlling 90% of AI chips would own the open ecosystem’s neutral commons. A brilliant move, a concentration risk, and the loss of a rare European-founded champion. Reported, not yet confirmed.
Nvidia just answered the question hanging over AI: the boom isn’t slowing, it’s accelerating, with five US giants set to spend $1.3 trillion next year. Boom or bubble, the scale is staggering — and Europe, able to regulate AI but not to build it, is barely at the table.
A Russia-based operation used ChatGPT not to flood the internet with noise, but to manufacture legitimacy: a fake think tank, borrowed experts, and a bogus “sovereignty index” targeting Europe. The danger of AI disinformation was never the volume. It’s that the machine can now make a lie look respectable.
The debate about AI is stuck on pictures — too perfect, too soulless. It’s a comfortable decoy. The real danger isn’t a machine that wakes up and hates us. It’s that we hand over our judgement, our choices, our relevance, one reasonable step at a time — and never notice the moment it stopped needing us.
From 24 August, ChatGPT ads arrive across the EU and Switzerland — but built differently: consent-first, contextual-only, opt-in for more. GDPR reshaped the product in real time. A genuine win for the Brussels Effect, and a sharp question about whether consent is control or ritual.