Post by Iliana Portugues

There's a question that has been sitting on the bench at every European TSO and chip foundry this week: which signal-processing stack will survive the regulatory turn that ENTSO-E codified in November 2025? The answer was already in motion. Most of the conversation missed it. 📍 On Thursday, 9 April 2026, the European Commission cleared €211 million in state aid to a Cambridge spinout most readers in our audience have never heard of. The trade press read it as a grant for graphene research. Brussels read it as something else entirely. Within 16 days, the Commission allocated more than €1 billion to defence projects with photonic-interconnect dependencies, scheduled the European Chips Act 2 for Q2 2027, and watched Britain's largest transmission operator commit to a hardware specification that does not yet exist at volume in Europe. The 28 April 2025 Iberian blackout lies beneath it all. Issue 33 of Current Thinking traces the chronology, names the doctrine the Commission has adopted operationally but not yet in public language, and works through what generation executives, transmission directors, and Series A investors must reprice before the Milan pilot line goes operational in 2028. The Q2 2027 Chips Act 2 legislative proposal is the test. #EnergyTech #Semiconductors #EuropeanIndustrialPolicy