Power Chip Prices Surge: AI, EVs & Energy Storage Collide

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Thursday July two, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: Anthropic's most powerful AI models come back online after a global blackout, a UN panel warns that AI is racing ahead of governments, power chip prices surge worldwide, AI-hunted software flaws become the cyber threat of the year, and to close out, two things you can actually try today, the sleep and focus tracker Rise, and the open-source language tutor Anki-inspired app Language Reactor. Let's get started.

Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 goes global again as Washington lifts export controls after a nineteen-day shutdown.

Samantha: We start with a story that has kept European businesses on edge for almost three weeks. The US Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Anthropic's most advanced AI models. Claude Fable 5 is back online worldwide from today, available through Anthropic's own platforms and through the big three cloud providers, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry. The more powerful sibling, Mythos 5, is being reintroduced more cautiously, only to approved US organizations, under a government-reviewed programme called Project Glasswing.

Bob: And that nineteen-day blackout genuinely hurt. European firms that had built customer service tools, coding assistants, and research pipelines on top of Fable were suddenly cut off, and many of them had to fall back to older models or scramble for alternatives from OpenAI and Mistral. What triggered the shutdown was a mix of safety concerns and a fresh round of export rules, aimed mainly at keeping the most capable models out of certain jurisdictions. The Commerce Department reviewed the situation and decided Fable 5 is safe to release globally, while Mythos 5, which is a genuinely more capable system, stays behind the fence for now.

Samantha: What's striking is how visible this made Europe's dependence on US policy decisions. During the blackout, several European governments and industry groups pushed back publicly, arguing that when a single agency in Washington flips a switch, entire sectors on this continent go dark. Anthropic says it will keep working with federal authorities to expand access under Project Glasswing, but there's no timeline for Mythos 5 outside the United States.

Bob: The bottom line for European users: Fable 5 is usable again from today, so if your product was built on it, you can turn things back on this afternoon. But strategically, this episode has quietly accelerated conversations in Paris, Berlin and Brussels about sovereign AI capacity. When Mistral, Aleph Alpha, and the smaller European labs pitched investors last month, "what if the Americans switch it off again" was suddenly the headline slide, not a footnote. Expect that to feed into the next round of EU industrial policy talks after the summer.

A UN scientific panel warns that AI is outrunning governments and widening the gap between rich and poor countries.

Samantha: Story two, and it lands with weight. The United Nations' Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence has published a preliminary report, drafted by forty experts, and the message is blunt. AI capabilities are moving faster than scientific understanding, and much faster than any government's ability to regulate them. The panel flags deceptive behaviour in advanced models, misuse for fraud and cyberattacks, and a widening inequality gap as AI adoption spreads unevenly across the world.

Bob: One line in the report stood out for European readers: the panel points out that the computing power needed to train frontier AI is concentrated in essentially two countries, the United States and China. Everyone else, including the European Union, is a customer. The panel calls for global governance, independent evaluation of AI systems, and common standards, which lines up neatly with the direction the EU's AI Act is already taking.

Samantha: And that's the interesting political dynamic here. Brussels can point at this UN report and say: our approach, mandatory evaluations, transparency obligations, risk categories, is being echoed at the global level. Whether Washington and Beijing sign up to independent international audits of their frontier models is another question entirely. Historically, both have been reluctant to let outside evaluators look under the hood.

Bob: For ordinary users the takeaway is more sobering. The panel says the tools that can commit fraud, generate convincing deepfakes, or probe critical systems for weaknesses are improving faster than the defences. That's not a hypothetical, it's the ground truth in cybersecurity right now. Which is a neat bridge to a story we'll come to shortly.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

Power semiconductor prices surge worldwide as AI, electric vehicles, and energy storage all pull on the same limited supply.

Bob: Story three takes us into the guts of the tech industry: power semiconductors. These are the chips that manage electricity, in your electric car, in a solar inverter, in the power supply of an AI server rack. And as of the first of July, a second wave of price hikes is now in effect. Infineon in Germany and Texas Instruments in the United States are leading the way, and other suppliers are following.

Samantha: Three things are pushing prices up at once. Raw material costs are climbing, there's a shortage of what's called eight-inch mature wafer capacity, essentially older-generation chip factories that can't be expanded overnight, and demand is exploding from three directions: AI data centres, electric vehicles, and grid-scale energy storage. Analysts at TrendForce describe it as the industry officially entering a boom cycle, with both volumes and prices rising together.

Bob: For Europe the implications are direct. Infineon is a European champion, so higher prices are good news for its shareholders and for German industrial revenue. But the customers, and that's a very long list including Volkswagen, Stellantis, Siemens Energy, and every heat pump maker on the continent, are going to see input costs go up. That could feed through into more expensive electric vehicles, more expensive solar installations, and tighter margins for European manufacturers already squeezed by energy prices.

Samantha: There's also a strategic angle. The European Chips Act was designed to reduce dependence on Asian suppliers, but most of the new investment is aimed at leading-edge logic, the kind of chips used in smartphones and AI accelerators. Mature power chips, the boring workhorses, have been under-invested for years, and now the shortage is biting. Expect the Commission to face fresh pressure to broaden the Chips Act's focus.

AI systems are finding zero-day software flaws faster than defenders can patch them, and that's the cyber story of the year.

Bob: Story four brings us back to security, and it's the one keeping chief information officers awake at night. Cybersecurity researchers are warning that AI models are now able to hunt down previously unknown vulnerabilities, so-called zero-days, in major software far faster than the industry can fix them. One report cited hundreds of vulnerabilities identified in browsers like Firefox alone. Traditional defences, essentially blocking known bad patterns, are being overwhelmed.

Samantha: The scale is what's new here. Finding a zero-day used to be highly skilled, painstaking work, done by small teams of specialist researchers. Now an AI model can chew through a codebase and surface likely weaknesses in hours. Defenders can use the same tools, of course, but attackers only need one flaw to slip through, and defenders have to close all of them. That asymmetry is exactly what has security experts calling for urgent global collaboration on new defences.

Bob: For European organisations, especially those covered by the NIS2 directive on network and information security, this raises the bar considerably. Hospitals, energy grids, water utilities and financial institutions are all now legally obliged to manage cyber risk more actively, and the threat model they were designed against was human-paced. AI-paced attacks are a different beast.

Samantha: The practical response is going to be a mix of things: more aggressive automated patching, so software updates roll out much faster than the traditional monthly cycle, wider use of memory-safe programming languages that structurally eliminate whole classes of bugs, and, awkwardly, more AI on the defender side too. Expect European cybersecurity agencies to push harder on information-sharing between companies, because a vulnerability found in one bank's system is very likely lurking in every other bank's system as well.

Rise is the sleep and energy tracker that turns your Apple Watch or phone data into practical advice you can act on today.

Bob: Right, to close out, two things you can actually use today. First one is Rise, spelled R-I-S-E. It's a sleep and energy app for iPhone and Android that does something the big fitness platforms mostly don't: it translates your sleep patterns into a simple energy curve for the day. So instead of just telling you that you slept seven hours and twelve minutes, it tells you roughly when you're likely to feel sharp, when you'll dip, and when to schedule demanding work versus admin.

Samantha: Rise pulls data from your phone's motion sensor or from an Apple Watch or a compatible wearable if you have one. It also builds up a picture of your personal circadian rhythm over about a week, so its predictions get more accurate the longer you use it. Users report that the biggest change isn't the sleep score, it's the nudge to stop scheduling important calls in your personal afternoon slump.

Bob: There's a free tier that covers the basics, and a paid subscription with more detailed coaching, but you don't need the paid version to get value out of it. The app is available in every European country through the App Store and Google Play, and the interface is in English, French, German and Spanish. Setup takes about five minutes, and you'll have your first energy forecast tomorrow morning. For anyone who has felt the mid-afternoon crash and wondered if it's avoidable, this is a low-effort experiment worth running for a week.

Samantha: One caveat: like all sleep apps, Rise is not a medical device, and if you suspect a serious sleep disorder you should still see a doctor. But as a tool for understanding your own rhythm, reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic have been consistently positive. It's one of those apps where the value shows up after about ten days, not on day one.

Language Reactor turns Netflix and YouTube into a language-learning classroom with dual subtitles and instant translation.

Bob: And the second Smart Find is Language Reactor. It's a free browser extension for Chrome and Edge that turns Netflix and YouTube into a serious language-learning tool. It shows subtitles in two languages at once, your native one and the one you're learning, and you can hover over any word to get a translation, hear it pronounced, and save it to a personal vocabulary list.

Samantha: It works with dozens of languages, including all the major European ones, so if you're a Dutch speaker brushing up your Italian before summer holidays, or a German learner trying to hold a conversation in Portuguese, this is a very practical shortcut. The extension slows down speech on demand, lets you jump back a sentence with a keyboard shortcut, and hides the subtitles you don't want so you can test yourself.

Bob: There's a free version that covers most of what casual learners need, and a paid Pro tier that adds features like AI-generated example sentences and offline export of your saved words. Installation takes about a minute from the Chrome Web Store, and it works instantly once you open Netflix or YouTube. Educators and language teachers across Europe have been recommending it for a few years now, and it remains one of the most quietly useful tools on the web.

Samantha: The nice thing is you're not adding a new activity to your day, you're just watching what you'd watch anyway, but in the target language. Twenty minutes an evening adds up quickly.

Samantha: Today we covered: Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 back online worldwide, the UN's urgent warning on AI risks and inequality, the global surge in power chip prices, AI-hunted zero-day flaws becoming the cyber threat of 2026, and two things to try yourself: Rise for sleep and daily energy, and Language Reactor for learning a language through Netflix and YouTube.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.