Welcome to ICYMI – a weekly snapshot of European news stories that have given me pause for thought. ICYMI is a chance for you to go beyond the front-page headlines and find out what other stories may be worthy of your attention. This week; why DeepSeek was not the tech miracle it was billed to be, what is prompting the UK to rethink its Digital Services Tax and how cybersecurity and cloud migration continue to dominate global IT leaders to do lists.
This week the media spotlight will inevitably be on Paris as France hosts the 2025 AI summit. Delegates will learn more about President Macron’s plans to invest €109 billion ($113 billion) in AI projects and hear how Europe plans to respond to the growing tech dominance of the US and China.
UK PM Keir Starmer will not be attending but his Tech Minister Peter Kyle has been giving interviews to the media unpacking the British government’s view that it needs to be western liberal democracies that lead on AI.
Kyle, along with many other delegates, will doubtless be cheered then by reports that the Chinese AI innovation DeepSeek might not be as revolutionary as first thought.
DeepSeek took the AI world by storm in January when it disclosed the minuscule hardware requirements of its DeepSeek-V3 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) AI model, which were apparently vastly lower than US-based AI models.
But how accurate are those figures? Tom’s Hardware reports market intelligence company SemiAnalysis claims that the company has some $1.6 billion worth of hardware investments including a fleet of 50,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs. SemiAnalysis suggests this finding undermines the idea that DeepSeek reinvented AI training and inference with dramatically lower investments than the US leaders of the AI industry.
DeepSeek overhyped?
Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind has also been discussing whether DeepSeek has been overhyped. “I think it’s probably the best work I’ve seen come out of China,” Hassabis said at a Google-hosted event in Paris ahead of the AI Action Summit. However, from a technology point of view, Hassabis said it was not a substantial change. “Despite the hype, there’s no actual new scientific advance … it’s using known techniques [in AI],” he said, adding that the hype around DeepSeek has been “exaggerated a little bit.”
Tech fall-out of Trump’s tariffs
The other big talking point among European media at the moment is of course US President Trump’s continuing flirtation with tariffs. In the UK, the Digital Services Tax (DST), a 2% levy on the UK revenues of large tech companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google, is very much on Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ mind.
The DST, introduced in April 2020, generated approximately £678 million last year. However, it has been a point of contention with the US, which views it as unfairly targeting American businesses. The Daily Telegraph reports that as the UK seeks to avoid potential US tariffs, the outcome of this review could have significant implications for UK-US trade relations.
Trust in leaders continues to plummet
The annual Edelman Trust Barometer provides a snapshot of the relationship between people and the institutions that run the services they rely on. Creative Salon has interesting analysis of this year’s barometer concluding that there is a significant global increase in public scepticism towards elites and institutions, with rising concerns about economic inequality and misinformation. Among its conclusions is that ‘fear that leaders lie to us’ is at an all-time high.
The survey also found that there is a growing sense, perhaps inspired by the cost-of-living crisis and sluggish economic growth, that future generations will be financially worse off than their predecessors. It also uncovered that six in 10 people hold grievances against business, government and the rich, agreeing with statements such as: ‘Businesses and government serve select few.’
Finally, this week IT Pro has the details of its annual survey. It spoke to over 700 IT leaders across the globe to compile its 2025 Future Focus report. Its chief finding was that while IT leaders are optimistic about the future and the possibilities of emerging technologies, there is also a sense of realism about the many potential hurdles facing them.
Another key finding was that companies are prioritising cybersecurity with 74% of respondents saying that cybersecurity investment will be more important in 2025 than it had been in 2024. Cloud migration is also a big focus in 2025 with just under two-thirds (64%) of respondents saying they would be investing more than in 2024.
