Hi reader,

Last week was about who locks in. This week was about who reprices. Inside 96 hours, the price of frontier intelligence got cut, the price of mid-management got cut, a Bulgarian PE wrote its first Croatian cheque, and two governments tabled €3.6 billion to build their own gigafactory.

If you wrote your 2026 plan in March, three of the assumptions in it are stale today. Read to the end of Story 3 if you run a P&L, and to the end of Story 4 if you ship anything that calls a model API.

On Thursday OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5 at $5 input and $30 output per million tokens with a one-million-token context window. On Friday DeepSeek previewed V4 with the same one-million context, MIT-licensed open weights, and a 1.6-trillion-parameter MoE variant trained on Huawei Ascend silicon, closing the gap on the closed frontier inside forty-eight hours of GPT-5.5 landing.

The closed-frontier ceiling came down and the open-frontier zero came up in the same week. The middle, where most enterprise inference contracts sit, is being squeezed from both sides at once. GitHub Copilot made GPT-5.5 generally available the day it shipped and quietly attached a 7.5x premium-request multiplier to it, a sign that flat-rate coding-agent pricing is cracking under the load it was built for.

One move before mid-May. Audit any vendor contract that quotes "frontier model access" without naming a specific model and a swap clause. The vendor is rationing now and the basket you are paying for is moving against you on a six-week clock.

AI has everyone talking. Not everyone has answers. At Gladly Connect Live, CX leaders from Condé Nast, Smith Optics, and more share exactly how they moved AI from pilot to production, the timeline, the systems, the QA loops. 13+ sessions built for the moment we're all in. For CX and ecommerce leaders. Atlanta, May 4–6. Space is limited, secure your spot now.

Register now

Bulgarian growth-equity firm BlackPeak Capital wrote a €7 million cheque into Zagreb-based Fasal Bio on Friday, backing a wood-based polymer the company calls Naturion that drops into existing injection-moulding lines. It is the first time BlackPeak has crossed the Drina to write a Croatian primary cheque, and it lands inside an explicit thesis from the firm's Sofia partners that intra-CEE mid-market growth is now its own asset class.

Regional capital staying regional is the move worth tracking

A Sofia-based PE crossing into Zagreb sounds small until you size it against the alternative: every prior decade, a Croatian Series B with a regional sponsor meant a Munich or London lead. The same week, Czechia and Poland tabled a joint EuroHPC application for a Central European AI Gigafactory worth more than €3.6 billion, and Brussels issued Poland a €44 billion SAFE defence-loan agreement with roughly 90% spend obligation inside Polish industry. Three different cheques in three different sizes, all with the same direction: CEE capital underwriting CEE supply.

For founders between Riga and Sofia, the buy-side just rewired. Refresh your investor list with intra-CEE growth-equity firms that can lead, not just participate. Model what a 2027 round looks like if a Polish or Czech AI-gigafactory tenant pre-approval becomes a procurement gate. And watch which Bulgarian, Czech, and Polish national champions get named in the next round of EU industrial-policy tranches; that list is your customer pipeline twelve months early.

ASML, the bellwether of the European semiconductor stack, told staff on Thursday it will cut roughly 1,700 jobs concentrated in management and operations while at the same time hiring around 1,400 new engineers. Snap announced 1,000 cuts (16% of headcount) earlier in the month and confirmed its CFO exit on the 23rd, telling investors that 65% of new code at Snap is now AI-generated. Nike cut another 1,400 roles, mostly in technology, in its second restructuring round of 2026.

The labor floor moved in the same week as the model floor

ASML is the cleanest data point: a company hiring net-negative in management and net-positive in engineering, with record bookings as the public excuse. Snap's "65% AI-generated code" line is now being said out loud on earnings calls because the market rewards it; shares jumped 7% on the announcement. European corporates from Amsterdam to Warsaw should expect the ASML template (cut the coordination layer first, hire technical depth) on their boards inside two quarters.

Three concrete moves before end of Q2. First, run your March 2026 headcount plan against the prices in Story 1, because the per-engineer productivity assumption that got the plan approved was sized for a more expensive token. Second, identify the roles in your org that read like ASML's 1,700: people whose week is spent moving information between humans rather than producing artifacts. Tell them what is changing now, not in November. Third, reset your 2026 hiring mix toward technical depth. The ratio you carried over from 2024 is the wrong ratio for the cap-table you will present in June.

The Story 1 reflex is to swap GPT-5.5 in as the default and call it done. That captures roughly 10% of the value the new shape unlocks. The harder, more useful move is to put GPT-5.5 and DeepSeek V4 head-to-head on your own workload this week, because for the first time both the closed-frontier and the open-weights labs ship with the same one-million-token context and similar long-horizon retry behaviour. The conditions for an honest comparison just landed.

Here is the 48-hour rig.

Pull twenty real tasks your team ran in the last sprint: support tickets escalated to engineering, eng-spec drafts, board-deck cleanup, customer-research synthesis, code-review notes. For each, write the end-state you wanted.

Hit GPT-5.5 and DeepSeek V4-Pro with the same prompt and the same context. Score on three columns: did it produce the end-state, what did it cost in tokens, how many turns did it take. Twenty tasks at roughly 100K tokens of context each runs at low hundreds of dollars of total inference, less than a one-day offsite. The output is your honest answer to "which model do we standardise on for which task class," and the answer will not be the same across the matrix.

That decision is the single biggest call a CTO can make this quarter, and the rig pays for itself the moment it kills one underperforming SaaS line item. One concrete step before May 15.

Pick one workflow currently bottlenecked on humans, run the rig, and walk into your next leadership meeting with two columns: the SaaS or contractor line you can replace, and the projected six-month spend on the chosen model. The team that lands in June budget conversations with two weeks of hard usage data on a re-priced workflow is the team that gets to pick which line items survive.

Cohere acquires Aleph Alpha at $20B; Schwarz Group leads €500M Series E. Cohere closed an all-stock acquisition of the Heidelberg lab on Friday, with Lidl/Kaufland-owner Schwarz Group leading a fresh €500M round. The transatlantic structure (Toronto base, German hosting) is the product: a non-US, non-China model vendor pre-built for AI Act sovereignty bars. Expect the merged entity in EU defence, public-sector, and finance RFPs inside the year.

Google adds $40 billion to Anthropic on top of AWS' $100 billion. A second hyperscaler signed Anthropic's compute and equity book this week, putting the running total of pre-paid capacity north of $140 billion. Buy-side read: any third lab without a hyperscaler pair has at most two quarters to find one.

Cursor 3.2 ships async subagents and multi-root workspaces. The IDE just became a fleet manager: /multitask runs parallel agents instead of queueing, and one agent can now span frontend, backend, and shared repos. Worth a half-day pilot if you run a 5-to-20 person engineering team because the ratio of senior engineers to shipped features just changed.

Tusk announces Polish drone armada co-developed with Ukraine. Warsaw confirmed today that Poland will build a domestic drone fleet using Ukrainian battlefield IP, with EU and Polish co-funding routed through Polish industry. The cleanest template yet for NATO members importing Ukraine's combat-validated stack as an actual procurement primitive.

Cognition AI in talks at $25 billion. Bloomberg reports the Devin maker is raising at more than 2x its March 2025 valuation, days after the SpaceX option on Cursor. The coding-agent layer is now priced like infrastructure, and the implied buyer pool is the same five hyperscaler-attached labs.

Thanks for making it to the end! I put my hard work and dedication into every email I send, I hope you are enjoying it.

Btw if you want to get your brand in front of a fast-growing audience of founders, investors, innovators, and tech professionals from South-East Europe all the way to Europe and the US, Signal connects the dots between local and global opportunities, and your message can be part of the story. Send an email at [email protected].

See you on the next edition,
Çelik