by Raphael Dudler | Jul 25, 2026 | gafam watch
Google published its first AI & Economy ATLAS report on July 23, analysing 15 million Gemini interactions and concluding that AI adoption is broad but shallow — reaching 68% of occupations but automating fewer than 10% of workplace tasks. The message: AI augments, it does not replace. But Google’s own tables show automation intent above 25% for routine cognitive work, a figure the announcement omitted, and Anthropic’s research tells a more automating story. Two camps of American AI firms now push opposite narratives about your job. gafam.ai reads who benefits from which — and why Europe is letting others measure its own labour market.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 14, 2026 | gafam watch
TSMC reported record June and Q2 2026 revenue — June sales up 67.9% year-on-year to the largest monthly figure in its 40-year history, driven by AI chip demand, with 3nm and advanced packaging sold out through year-end. The company makes nearly every leading-edge AI chip on earth and holds 73% of the foundry market, concentrating the entire AI economy on one island in a geopolitically tense strait. But beneath that concentration lies a fact rarely stated: none of those chips can be made without one machine, built only by Europe’s ASML. gafam.ai reads the chokepoint Europe actually holds.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 7, 2026 | gafam watch
OpenAI has proposed handing the US government a 5% equity stake — worth roughly $42.6 billion — through a vehicle modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, and wants Anthropic, Google and Meta to cede matching stakes. It remains a proposal, not a deal: rivals haven’t agreed, Congress hasn’t acted, and Reuters could not independently verify it. But if any version proceeds, it rewires every future AI fight — because a government that owns AI companies cannot regulate them impartially. gafam.ai reads what state ownership of AI means for Europe.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 6, 2026 | gafam watch
On June 30, Chinese food-delivery giant Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0 — a 1.6-trillion-parameter model released under a permissive MIT license, which the company says is the first model of its scale trained and run entirely on domestic Chinese chips, with no Nvidia GPUs. The benchmark claims are self-reported and the full weights aren’t yet public. But the hardware milestone is the story — and it lands as Washington gates access to American models. gafam.ai reads what it means for Europe’s impossible AI choice.
by Raphael Dudler | Jul 3, 2026 | gafam watch
Starting July 6, Tesla will cap employee AI spending at $200 per week, after software engineers were burning through thousands of dollars in tokens weekly. It follows near-identical caps at Uber, Meta, Amazon and Walmart — the industry-wide shift from “tokenmaxxing” to “token budgeting.” There’s a telling carve-out: Musk exempted his own xAI products, while Tesla’s engineers reportedly prefer Anthropic’s Claude. gafam.ai reads the great AI cost reckoning — and what it means for a Europe with no in-house model to fall back on.
