Hi reader,

Last week was about who locks in capacity. This week was about what gets cut to pay for it, and where the new capacity is going to live. Inside 48 hours, Meta and Microsoft turned 17,000 jobs into AI hardware budget, regional founders priced AI-first economics into five fresh rounds, Croatia announced the largest investment in CEE history with a €50B AI data center in Topusko, and Anthropic put Claude into the daily tool of every architect, designer, video editor, and 3D modeler.

If your 2026 plan assumes hiring and AI spending live in different boxes, the past five days disagree. Read to the end of Story 3 if you operate anywhere in the Adriatic corridor, and to Story 4 if you sell into architects, designers, or anyone who lives inside a creative tool.

On Thursday April 23, Meta told staff it would cut 8,000 employees, 10% of headcount, with the layoffs landing on May 20. The internal memo read like a tradeoff: people are being cut to free up cash for a 2026 AI hardware bill that has roughly doubled to $135B from $72B last year. The same week, Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 7% of its US workforce, the first such program in its history, while CEO Satya Nadella has been on the record that AI now writes about 30% of Microsoft's code.

What used to be a fight between the finance team protecting costs and the engineering team building infrastructure has been collapsed into one trade: every dollar that comes off the salary line is one more dollar of GPU.

Meta said the quiet part out loud in its memo. Microsoft picking voluntary buyouts (a slower, calmer tool than layoffs) is a tell that this is being run as a multi-quarter sequence rather than a one-time cut. Snap and Nike already moved the same way earlier this month.

The next 90 days will produce three things every operator should be ready for. Software contracts will renegotiate downward as buyer headcount falls. Hiring plans approved in March will be reissued with smaller numbers in June.

And for the first time, public-company guidance will name AI substitution as the reason costs are coming out, instead of vague "operational efficiency" language. If you run a team, get the jobs that AI can already do onto a list with named owners this week. The list you bring into your June board meeting is the one that decides which spending survives Q3.

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The same week Meta cut 8,000 jobs, Hungarian biology-AI startup Turbine raised a $25M Series B led by Interactive Venture Partners with Accel, MSD Global Health Innovation, and Beiersdorf in the syndicate.

Czech ValkaAI closed €12M pre-seed led by Rockaway Ventures, one of the largest pre-seeds on record in the region. Czech Edmund raised €2.5M for an AI debugging platform aimed at industrial maintenance. Bulgarian Quillon (formerly Acclara AI) raised $1.5M led by 42CAP for AI-driven technical accounting, and Polish Zynt picked up $0.5M from 24Ventures and angels for B2B signal intelligence.

The pattern is the inverse of the Meta memo.

Where US incumbents are taking people out to fund AI hardware, regional founders are designing the AI-first economics into the company from day one. The new template is six to fifteen people, $1M–$25M raised, one vertical product surface, and a sales model that does not assume hiring to grow.

Regional investors are starting to back that ratio explicitly. Rockaway leading €12M into ValkaAI at pre-seed is the first time a regional fund has paid Series A prices for an AI-first team before product-market fit.

For founders between Riga and Sofia, two moves before May 30. First, rewrite the headcount slide of your deck so it reads like a system diagram, not a hiring plan.

The investors reading it are the same ones who just watched Meta cut 8,000 jobs to free hardware budget. Second, go after the European subsidiaries of the Story 1 incumbents directly. Meta and Microsoft are not the only US firms making this trade. Their CEE and Adriatic country managers will get AI budgets handed to them this summer, and the team buying an AI tool that replaces a job is the team you already sell to.

On Tuesday April 28 at the Three Seas Initiative Summit in Dubrovnik, Pantheon Atlas LLC announced a €50B+ AI data center and innovation campus for Topusko in Sisak-Moslavina County, 45 minutes south of Zagreb.

The campus will be built to NVIDIA GW-scale AI factory standards on 310 acres (expandable to 450), with 1 GW of total capacity and 800 MW of usable IT load, the highest in the European Union. The first €12B phase begins construction in 2027, with operations starting in early 2029.

This is the largest investment in CEE history, and the public infrastructure that comes with it stays.

Greenvolt International Power, majority-owned by KKR, signed a letter of intent for an on-site 500 MW solar plant with 8,000 MWh of battery storage, and the facility will route up to 5.2 GW of renewable capacity onto Croatia's national grid through four independent 400 kV transmission lines.

Croatian heavy-industry partner Končar Group is building 280 km of new transmission lines and a dedicated substation. The roads, fiber, and electrical infrastructure that remains with the state is valued at roughly €500M, more than the Pelješac Bridge cost when it was built. Sisak-Moslavina County, a region that has lost population for two decades, has formally signed a cooperation agreement designating the project as a county priority.

For founders and investors anywhere in the Adriatic corridor, three things to watch over the next 18 months. First, the anchor-tenant question: which AI labs and enterprise buyers commit to Topusko capacity before the doors open in 2029, because that list is the buyer pool you want to be inside.

Second, the construction supply chain: 280 km of new transmission lines, a substation, fiber backbone, and roughly 6,000 indirect jobs add up to a regional build-out that smaller Croatian, Slovenian, and Bosnian firms can win pieces of if they show up early.

Third, the policy template: the next CEE country that lands a project this size will use the Sisak-Moslavina cooperation agreement as the starting point, so the precedent being set in the next twelve months becomes the standing offer for Topusko-2 in Bulgaria, Romania, or Poland.

Europe ships more engineering graduates than the United States and leads the world in deep tech, sustainability, and industrial research. It is also absent from the list of trillion-dollar tech companies.

The question stopped being "can Europe innovate" years ago. The real question is why so many promising European companies stall before global scale, and which institutions are doing something about it. From May 11 to 13, Podim 2026 puts that argument on stage in Maribor.

This is the year Podim stops being a regional flagship and starts acting like a strategic platform.

The European Innovation Council, the European Commission's Startup and Scaleup Taskforce, EUSPA, EU-INC, Future 500, and Scale-X by UNIDO are all in the room, alongside founders who have already built global companies from the region and investors deploying across the full lifecycle.

New tie-ins with Scale-X (UNIDO) and Munich's Bits & Pretzels push the catchment far beyond Slovenia. The ecosystem Podim represents (Western Balkans, Adriatic corridor, Central Europe) has produced a generation of globally competitive companies and has been historically locked out of EU-level scaling instruments. The fix is starting to look like direct connective tissue to those instruments rather than another local pitch event.

The bench is the reason to show up. Stefan Drüssler (EIC Board, MD of UnternehmerTUM, ranked by the Financial Times as Europe's top startup hub), Anna Krzyżanowska (European Commission advisor), and Robin Wauters (co-creator of EU-INC) carry the policy lens. Amir Salihefendić (Doist, 50M users without venture capital), Vlatko Matijević (CTO of Orqa FPV), Ioan Iacob (FlowX.AI, $44M+ raised to rebuild banking infrastructure), and Stjepan Orešković (Bosqar Invest, listed, 23 countries, leading Future 500) carry the operator lens. 60+ VC funds running €10B+ in combined capital, anchored by Enterprise Investors (€2.5B deployed, 160+ companies, 140+ exits) and South Central Ventures (€300M+ AUM), are confirmed for the Investor Academy meeting 220 selected startups in the catalogue.

If you run a CEE company between Series A and Series C, this is a 72-hour shortcut to the buy-side that funds your next round. Three days, May 11–13, Maribor. Programme at podim.org.

Startup Wise Guys, one of the most active accelerators between Tallinn and the Adriatic, is opening its Western Balkan Accelerator to founders in Kosovo and North Macedonia. Up to €50K initial cheque, follow-on potential to €250K. 14 weeks, hybrid format, with bootcamps in Pristina and Skopje. Built with EBRD, Swiss EP, STIKK, Makerspace Innovation Center Prizren, Zephyr Angels, and other ecosystem partners. Deadline May 18, rolling review.

The reason this matters more than another batch announcement: an international accelerator is moving inside the Kosovo perimeter rather than expecting founders to relocate to Tallinn or Sofia for access to the Wise Guys network.

That is the friction layer that has historically priced regional B2B founders out of serious capital. If you are running a SaaS, AI, cybersecurity, sustainability, fintech, or B2B vertical company with an MVP, real users, pilots, LOIs, or first customers, do not pre-disqualify yourself because you "are not investment-ready." That is the work the program does with you for fourteen weeks.

What you actually get if selected: practical workshops and weekly 1:1s, mentorship from the Startup Wise Guys network, structured support across go-to-market, sales, product, fundraising, legal readiness, and scaling, direct exposure to the investor pool at Demo Day, and the cheque that lets you ship the next quarter. Apply here before May 18, and forward this to any serious B2B founder you know in Kosovo or Skopje. The difference between an idea that stays in place and a company that compounds is often a single application sent on time.

Apply here now!

On Tuesday April 28, Anthropic shipped nine Claude connectors for the tools creative pros use every day. Adobe Creative Cloud across 50+ apps (Photoshop, Illustrator, Firefly, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, InDesign, Express, Adobe Stock), Autodesk Fusion for CAD, Blender for 3D, SketchUp for architecture and product design, Ableton for music production, Splice for samples, Affinity by Canva for design, and Resolume Arena and Wire for VJs and live visuals.

This is Anthropic moving the assistant out of the code editor and into the pro creative workflow.

The Cursor template (chat sits next to the file you are working on, edits it for you) is now landing in industries that have stayed mostly outside the AI tooling story. A Fusion subscriber can describe a part and watch Claude generate or modify the 3D model. A SketchUp user can describe a room and open the result inside the app.

The Blender connector is a direct hook into Blender's Python API, and Anthropic joined the Blender Development Fund as a patron to back continued Python API work. That last move says Anthropic plans to be in the 3D toolchain for a decade, not a quarter.

If you sell to architects, designers, video editors, animators, music producers, or industrial engineers, two moves before Q3. First, ask which of these connectors your customers already turned on, because the answer is changing weekly.

Second, watch which tool vendors go deeper on Claude versus build their own assistant. Adobe still ships Firefly. Autodesk still ships its own copilot. The connector strategy means Anthropic now sits on top of the workflow whether or not the tool vendor wants it there, and the next conversation between any large enterprise and Adobe or Autodesk will include a question about whether the in-product assistant is theirs or Claude's.

NVIDIA ships Nemotron 3 Nano Omni. NVIDIA released a 30B-parameter open multimodal model on April 29 with 256K context, an MoE that activates about 3B parameters per call, and 9x throughput vs comparable open models on the same speed budget. Day-zero pickups include Foxconn, Palantir, and H Company, with Oracle and Dell evaluating. Worth a half-day pilot if you ship agents that need to "see and hear," because the cost ceiling on open multimodal just dropped sharply.

EU agrees 2027 roadmap for the Cloud and AI Development Act. On April 23, the Council, Commission, and Parliament agreed a timeline targeting CADA in force by Q4 2027, with explicit carve-outs for defence, public administration, and critical infrastructure compute. The draft architecture lets EU bodies use external compute while keeping "jurisdictional control over whether the output becomes externally effective." Translation: an official definition of where the legal transaction happens, not just where the GPU is. Worth getting in front of your EU customers before they sign new 2026 contracts.

Ukraine formalizes the "Drone Deals" arms-export framework. Zelensky announced on April 28 that Kyiv will run weapons exports through a regulated multi-year cooperation framework, building on the existing Saudi, UAE, and Qatar 10-year agreements and adding air defense systems and electronic warfare alongside drones. This is the first time a sitting wartime exporter has built export controls into the same treaty stack as combat-validated IP licensing. Polish, Czech, and Romanian primes are the closest landed-cost partners.

OpenAI extends Codex and Bedrock managed agents to AWS. OpenAI and AWS expanded their partnership in late April to bring Codex and Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI into AWS in limited preview, alongside the GPT-5.5 release announced April 23. The signal: OpenAI now ships across Microsoft, Oracle, and AWS. Single-cloud AI lock-in just got harder to defend.

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