Credit: Amadeus Capital Partners
Hauser sat down with CNBC’s The Tech Download podcast this month. Arjun Kharpal and Kai Nicol-Schwarz published the write-up on 14 August.
His track record is the reason to listen. He co-founded Acorn Computers in 1978, helped create Arm, and now backs European deep-tech startups through Amadeus Capital.
That is four decades of watching technology waves arrive, which makes his position on this one worth reading carefully.
The full conversation runs to 40 minutes as a video episode. It covers AI, semiconductors, quantum computing and European sovereignty.
Not a bubble call, and not a defence either
Hauser starts higher than most sceptics. “This is a revolution that will create more value than probably any other technology revolution that we’ve ever seen,” he said.
Then he added one word. It will be a “rollercoaster”.
On prices he is specific rather than sweeping. Some valuations have “clearly gotten ahead of themselves”, he said.
The risk he named is structural. He pointed to recently announced circular financing deals.
Why that matters
Circular financing is where a chipmaker takes a stake in an AI lab that then buys its chips. The Bank for International Settlements flagged it in June, warning an AI bust could hit credit markets as hard as 2008.
Hauser is not predicting that outcome. He argues the largest players survive a reset.
OpenAI and Anthropic hold significant capital reserves, on his account, and should withstand turbulence even if expectations reset around them.
So the position is narrow and unusual. The revolution is real, the prices are not all real, and the biggest names are not the fragile part.
That leaves an obvious question he does not answer directly. If the labs survive a reset, somebody else absorbs it, and the circular deals are where that would land.
Set against the other voices
Compare that with Masayoshi Son, who told SoftBank shareholders in June that calling AI a bubble is an insult.
Son has also called such commentary blasphemy. Hauser is doing something different from either camp.
He is separating the technology question from the pricing question, and answering them in opposite directions. That is harder to headline and more useful to read.
The chip argument is the freshest part
Hauser co-created the architecture inside most of the world’s phones, so his view on the next one carries weight. He thinks AI is forcing a rethink of computing architecture itself.
The pressures are practical. AI is expensive to run, chips are difficult to cool, memory is expensive, and bottlenecks run across the industry.
He pointed at two responses. In-memory computing and photonic computing both aim to cut the energy spent moving data between processors and memory.
His comparison is the striking bit. Those changes could matter as much as the architectural breakthroughs that let Arm challenge the established chipmakers.
“I never thought that we’d have a very fundamental change in the computer architecture as a result of AI,” he said.
Money is already moving that way
The photonics half of that is not theoretical. Nvidia spent $6.5bn across photonics companies in three months to replace copper with light inside AI data centres.
That is a bottleneck being bought out rather than engineered around. The problem Hauser describes has a price attached already.
In-memory computing is further back. It moves the arithmetic into the memory rather than shuttling data to a processor and back.
Both are attempts at the same target. The cost of moving data, rather than the cost of the maths.
Arm itself is the precedent Hauser is reaching for. It won on power efficiency at a moment when the industry was optimising for raw speed, and the constraint created the opening.
Europe can build, and cannot scale
On the continent’s prospects Hauser is direct in both directions. European companies have the innovation and the skill to compete with the US and China.
The failure is at the next stage. European companies struggle to grow from a small startup into a genuinely global competitor.
That is not a new diagnosis, and coming from an investor who has funded the attempt it is a pointed one. Amadeus Capital exists to make that jump happen.
He connects it to something larger he keeps returning to. Technological sovereignty.
The dependency he names
Hauser worries Europe depends on foreign suppliers for critical technologies. His range runs from AI models to semiconductor design software.
That second item is the one most people skip. Chip design software is a small market with few suppliers, and it sits upstream of everything else.
The desk has covered that layer moving. Synopsys pulled back from chip fab software in July to chase AI design margins.
His caveat is as firm as his warning. Close cooperation with allies is essential, and dependence still carries risks in an era of geopolitical tension and export controls.
Export controls are the mechanism that turns a supplier into a chokepoint. A tool you can buy today is a dependency, not a purchase.
The line
His conclusion was blunt, and it is the quotable one. Europe should preserve its partnership with the US, but it should not become “a technology colony of the U.S.”
Brussels has been acting on that fear already. The Commission proposed a sovereignty package in June restricting US cloud providers from handling sensitive government data, alongside a Chips Act 2.0.
Hauser is not arguing for a break. He is arguing that partnership and dependence are different arrangements, and Europe has been treating them as the same one.
What would settle it
Three things, and the first is the architecture claim. In-memory and photonic computing are testable, and Nvidia has already priced part of the answer.
The second is whether a European company makes the jump he says none of them make. That is a question about growth capital and management, not about research.
The third is the rollercoaster. Hauser expects a reset that the largest labs survive, and the circular financing deals he flagged are where the evidence will show up first.
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