Happy summer, friends.

This week the AI story stopped being about smarter models and turned into wires and watts. A US fund walked into Pristina with NVIDIA and a plan for 1.2 gigawatts, a bigger number than the €50 billion Pantheon campus Croatia announced in April. OpenAI shipped its strongest model yet, then gave the keys to Washington first. Oracle put AI-driven job cuts into an SEC filing. And the EU's flagship compute plan kept shedding bidders.

For founders in the region, the Kosovo plan is the one to read closely, weighed against Croatia's, and the EU tender at the bottom shows why a small state with spare power suddenly has the upper hand. The OpenAI gating is the clearest sign yet that frontier compute is becoming something governments manage, not just something you buy.

Kosovo's minister of industry, trade and innovation, Mimoza Kusari-Lila, met the team behind a proposed AI factory this week: the US firm Dardania Capital, with partners from NVIDIA and Hercules Capital. The plan is a 1.2 gigawatt data center for frontier AI, which the backers call the first of its size in Central Europe. For a country whose peak electricity demand sits near 1.2 gigawatts, that figure is the whole story.

That "first of its size" claim deserves an asterisk. In April, Croatia announced Pantheon, a roughly 1 gigawatt, €50 billion AI campus at Topusko with named backers, an on-site solar-and-battery plant, and a 2029 completion date. Kosovo's number is bigger on paper, 1.2 GW against 1, but Pantheon is financed and scheduled, while Kosovo holds a meeting and a press post. The Balkans now carries two gigawatt-scale bids inside two months.

Compute siting has become a contest small states can enter, on cheap land, a young workforce, and spare grid. The catch for Kosovo is that same number: 1.2 GW is roughly the national grid at peak, so this is an energy project wearing a data-center label. If you build or invest in the region, watch what gets signed after the photo, the power terms and who funds the substation, and judge whether Kosovo's bid turns into steel or stays a headline that beats Croatia's.

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On June 26 OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 in three tiers: Sol, the flagship, Terra, an everyday model at half the price of GPT-5.5, and Luna, a low-cost speed tier. The twist was the rollout. Instead of a public launch, OpenAI opened access to roughly 20 trusted partners and shared the models with US agencies first, following a June 2 executive order that asks the government to benchmark frontier models before wide release.

This is the gating of the frontier. A model good enough to matter now reaches Washington before it reaches you, and "available in the coming weeks" becomes the default for anything at the top of the stack. That reshapes the demand side of every compute story this week. The labs are not slowing down; they are being asked to clear a national-security gate, and the gate now sits between the model and the market.

For operators, the read is two-speed planning. Build on Terra and Luna, which are priced to run at scale today, and treat Sol as a capability you will rent later, not a tool you deploy this quarter. If you sell into government or critical infrastructure, the gating cuts the other way: a spot on the trusted-partner list is about to be a moat, so find out how that list gets drawn.

On June 22 Oracle told regulators it had shed about 21,000 roles in a year, near 13% of its workforce, and named AI as a cause in the filing itself: the deployment of AI across its operations "have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce." Headcount fell from 162,000 to 141,000, and restructuring costs jumped to $1.84 billion from $374 million the year before.

The candor is the signal. Plenty of firms have blamed AI for cuts in press interviews; Oracle put it on paper to the SEC, which turns it from a talking point into a legal statement. Read it next to the compute stories: the same company pouring billions into AI data centers is removing the people that AI now covers. The capital goes into the building and comes back out of the payroll.

If you run a team, the move is to map which roles your own AI spending quietly replaces, before a board or a filing does it for you. The cut line tends to fall on coordination work, not creation work. Watch whether more large vendors copy Oracle and shift AI from the earnings-call narrative into the risk-factors section, because once it lives in filings, it becomes the industry's official story.

While Kosovo courted a private 1.2 GW project, the EU's flagship compute push went the other way. Bloomberg reported the bloc's €20 billion AI gigafactory tender slipping into the summer, with interested parties falling from around 70 to roughly 10. Schwarz Group is building its own Berlin data center without EU money, and Deutsche Telekom wants demand guarantees first. In the same stretch, Brussels moved to set binding energy and water standards for large data centers as their power draw climbs.

The contrast carries the week. Public, bloc-level compute is stalling on funding math and grid limits, while the action moves to single states and private capital that can promise power fast. Europe wants sovereign AI, but the places that can actually deliver a gigawatt are not always the ones writing the strategy in Brussels. Power availability, not policy ambition, is sorting the winners.

If you site infrastructure or raise around it, the opening is in markets with spare grid and a government that moves quickly, which is the exact pitch Kosovo and its neighbours can make. The constraint to track is not the subsidy, it is the substation queue: in the dense Western European hubs, grid connection now runs years. Find where the power sits uncommitted, because that map is the real data-center map.

Four tools to install or test this week. Marketing, design, and sales were quiet, so productivity and dev carry it.

Productivity: Perplexity now runs inside Microsoft 365. Perplexity put its Computer agent into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, with a command panel and inline confirmations before it acts. For operators who live in Office, it turns research-to-document into one move instead of a copy-paste relay. Point it at one recurring report you still build by hand.

Productivity: Cursor shipped an iPhone app. Cursor released an iOS app on June 29 that lets you launch and steer agents by voice, then hand a running session to the cloud so it keeps working with your laptop shut. It needs iOS 26, and Composer 2.5 is 75% off through July 5. Kick off one job from your phone this week and see whether mobile actually fits your flow.

Dev: Claude Code's Week 26 update lands. Anthropic shipped shell-based MCP login, a shell mode that explains command output without a second prompt, and a /rewind that can resume from before you ran /clear. Background subagents now surface permission prompts instead of auto-denying. Update and try the MCP login flow on one server.

Dev: Cursor added plain-language Automations. Cursor's new Automations let you describe a task and have it wire up the triggers, including new GitHub and Slack ones, plus computer use. It is the set-and-forget layer sitting on top of the agent. Describe one repetitive multi-step task and let it build the trigger for you.

Next edition soon,
Çelik