CoreWeave Revenue +134%: AI Infrastructure & EU AI Act

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

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: CoreWeave posts blockbuster results as AI infrastructure demand explodes, IBM and the University of Chicago claim a verifiable quantum breakthrough, North American factories order robots at a record pace, and Anthropic rolls out watermarks in Claude to comply with the EU AI Act. Then two things you can actually try today: the free open-source password manager KeePassXC, and the free European map service Qwant Maps. Let's start with CoreWeave.

CoreWeave's revenue soars one hundred thirty-four percent as AI compute demand hits record levels.

Samantha: CoreWeave just posted numbers that tell you almost everything you need to know about the state of AI right now. Quarterly revenue jumped one hundred thirty-four percent to one point three six billion dollars, and the company signed a six point five billion dollar expansion with OpenAI plus a fourteen point two billion dollar deal with Meta. Its order backlog now sits at fifty-five point six billion. That is not a company selling software, that is a company renting out raw computing power, and the world cannot get enough of it.

Bob: What CoreWeave really does is run data centres packed with Nvidia graphics chips, and it rents that capacity by the hour to companies training large AI models. Thirty-two data centres, more than two hundred fifty thousand Nvidia chips. The reason this matters is that even the biggest AI labs, OpenAI and Meta included, cannot build data centres fast enough themselves. So they lease from specialists like CoreWeave. And when Meta signs a fourteen billion dollar contract, that is essentially a bet that generative AI demand will keep climbing for years.

Samantha: For European users and businesses, this has two sides. On one hand, more global compute capacity means European developers who tap into OpenAI or Anthropic keep getting faster, cheaper access to those models. On the other hand, almost none of this build-out is happening in Europe itself. The heavy iron sits in the United States. That leaves European regulators nervous about digital sovereignty, because if a geopolitical dispute ever closes the tap, European hospitals, banks and universities using American AI would feel it immediately.

Bob: And there is a second European angle worth noting. Every one of these mega-deals pushes electricity demand higher, which pushes power prices higher across the interconnected grid. Analysts have been pointing out for months that European industry is already competing with American AI data centres for the same energy supply chain, from transformers to gas turbines. So even when the announcement is about a New Jersey warehouse full of chips, the effect ripples all the way to a factory in Bavaria trying to lock in a power contract.

IBM and University of Chicago demonstrate seventy logical qubits with verifiable quantum advantage.

Samantha: IBM and researchers at the University of Chicago say they have crossed a real threshold in quantum computing. They ran a computation using seventy so-called logical qubits, executed thousands of operations in about fifteen minutes, and, crucially, they can prove the result is accurate. That last part is what makes this different from earlier quantum claims. The paper, called Sampling hard circuits with verifiably high fidelity, argues the calculation goes beyond what the best classical supercomputers can reasonably do.

Bob: The key word there is logical. A logical qubit is not one physical particle, it is a bundle of many physical qubits stitched together with error correction so they behave reliably. Getting seventy of those working together is a serious engineering achievement, because quantum systems normally drift and lose information within microseconds. And being able to verify the answer is the piece the field has struggled with for years, since previous quantum advantage demonstrations were criticised for being impossible to check.

Samantha: For Europe this lands at an interesting moment. The European Union has been pouring money into its Quantum Flagship programme, and countries from Germany to the Netherlands have national quantum strategies. What today's news shows is that verifiable quantum computing is moving out of the pure physics lab and toward something enterprises can trust. That in turn accelerates the case for European companies in pharmaceuticals, materials science and cryptography to start planning for a post-quantum world sooner rather than later.

Bob: And there is a security angle nobody in Brussels can ignore. Every serious step toward useful quantum computers shortens the timeline in which today's encryption might be broken. The European Commission has already told member states to prepare for post-quantum cryptography migration this decade. A result like this makes those deadlines feel a lot less theoretical, especially for banks and government agencies still sitting on legacy systems that were never designed with quantum threats in mind.

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.

North American robot orders jump twenty-one percent as automation spreads beyond car factories.

Bob: North American manufacturers spent six hundred twenty-two million dollars on industrial robots in the second quarter, up twenty-one point three percent from a year earlier. That is according to the Association for Advancing Automation. The really interesting number is underneath the headline: non-automotive customers now account for fifty-six percent of all robots ordered. So semiconductors, electronics, life sciences, food production. Automotive, which used to define the robotics industry, actually declined in the quarter.

Samantha: That shift matters more than the headline growth rate. For decades, if you wanted to know how robotics was doing you looked at Detroit or Wolfsburg. Now a food packaging plant in Ohio and a chip fab in Arizona are driving demand. The technology has become cheap and flexible enough that smaller manufacturers can justify it, and the labour shortage in a lot of industries is pushing companies to automate tasks they used to do by hand. This is robotics finally going mainstream in industry.

Bob: For European industry the read-across is direct. Germany, Italy and Spain have big manufacturing bases that face the same demographic pressures and the same competition from lower-cost countries. Industry groups have been arguing for years that Europe needs to accelerate automation across mid-sized firms, not just at the big carmakers. Numbers like these from North America give that argument fresh ammunition, because if American food producers and electronics makers are automating this aggressively, European rivals cannot afford to sit still.

Samantha: There is also a policy piece here. The European Union's industrial strategy has been pushing so-called strategic autonomy in areas like chips and life sciences, and robotics is quietly one of the enablers. If a European semiconductor plant or vaccine facility is going to compete on cost, automation is a big part of the answer. The challenge is that Europe still imports many of its industrial robots from Japan and increasingly from China, so the growth story is real but the supply chain question is not solved.

Anthropic starts watermarking every Claude reply worldwide after EU AI Act rules take effect.

Bob: Anthropic began embedding watermarks in all text output from its Claude AI models on August twelve, worldwide. This is a direct response to transparency requirements in the EU AI Act that came into force on August two. The watermark is applied at the model level, and it is designed to make it possible to tell whether a piece of text was generated by Claude. The company says the responsibility to mark AI content sits with the model provider, not just the person using it.

Samantha: A watermark in text is not a visible logo, it is a statistical pattern woven into word choices that a detector can recognise later. The technical debate about whether these watermarks survive editing or paraphrasing is genuinely open, but the policy signal here is clear. A major AI company is now applying an EU rule globally, which is exactly the so-called Brussels effect European regulators hoped for. Rather than run separate versions for different regions, Anthropic chose one worldwide standard, and it happens to be the European one.

Bob: For European users this is the AI Act moving from text on paper to something you can actually see in the products you use. Teachers, journalists, and hiring managers have all been asking for reliable ways to detect AI-generated content, and while watermarking is not a silver bullet, it is a concrete step. The bigger question is whether OpenAI, Google, and Meta will follow. If they do, the practical experience of using AI in Europe over the next year is going to feel different from what came before.

Samantha: The bottom line is that Europe's regulatory strategy is working roughly the way it was designed to. When the market you are trying to reach is five hundred million consumers and the fines run into billions, you comply, and then you often just apply that compliance everywhere because running two versions is expensive. Critics will argue this slows innovation, supporters will point out that trust in AI systems is now the actual bottleneck, not raw model performance. Both can be true at the same time.

The free password manager KeePassXC keeps every login on your own device, no cloud required.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually use today. The first is KeePassXC, a free open-source password manager. Instead of storing your passwords in a company's cloud, it keeps them in a single encrypted file on your own computer. You unlock it with one master password, and the file works across Windows, Mac and Linux. There are companion apps on iPhone and Android that read the same file, so you can sync it through whatever cloud service you already trust, or not sync it at all.

Samantha: What makes KeePassXC interesting is exactly what it does not do. It does not send anything to a server you cannot inspect, it does not charge a subscription, and it has been independently audited. Users typically pair it with a browser extension that fills in logins automatically, and it supports the newer passkey standard as well, so you are not stuck in old password habits. It handles two-factor codes too, so you can drop a separate authenticator app if you prefer everything in one place.

Bob: For European listeners there is one extra reason it fits well here. Because the encrypted database is a file you own, it sits under your jurisdiction, not under whichever country hosts a commercial password vault. If you use European cloud storage to sync it, your credentials never leave Europe. Setup takes about fifteen minutes: install the app, create your database, pick a strong master password you can actually remember, and start importing your existing logins. The website is keepassxc dot org.

Samantha: One tip worth mentioning. When you set up your master password, write it down once, on paper, and put it somewhere safe. Because there is no company to call if you forget it, that master password is genuinely the only key. It sounds old-fashioned, but users who have lost access to a locally encrypted vault will tell you it is the single most important step. After that, the daily experience is very close to using a commercial manager, without the monthly bill.

Qwant Maps offers free European navigation with turn-by-turn directions and no tracking.

Bob: The second thing to try today is Qwant Maps, a free map and navigation service from the French search company Qwant. It gives you turn-by-turn directions for driving, walking, cycling and public transport in cities across Europe, and it does that without linking your journeys back to an advertising profile. The maps are built on OpenStreetMap data, which is the community-maintained open alternative to the big commercial map platforms.

Samantha: For everyday use the appeal is straightforward. You open it in a browser or on a phone, type a destination, and get a route. No account is required. Reviewers highlight that place searches, business listings, and public transport routing in European cities are handled well, which is usually where free alternatives struggle. It will not replace a specialist offline navigation app for a road trip through the Alps, but for city errands and finding a café it is genuinely usable.

Bob: The reason it belongs in a European tech round-up is the data-flow question. When you search for a maternity clinic, a lawyer's office, or an addiction support group on a mainstream map service, that query typically feeds an advertising system. Qwant says it does not do that. For anyone who has grown uncomfortable with how much their phone knows about their movements, swapping a default map app for one built around European privacy rules is a small change with a real effect. You will find it at qwant dot com slash maps.

Samantha: Today we covered CoreWeave's blockbuster AI infrastructure quarter, IBM and Chicago's verifiable quantum breakthrough, the surge in North American robot orders, Anthropic rolling out global watermarks for Claude, and two things to try yourself: the free password manager KeePassXC and the European map service Qwant Maps.

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

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