Tesco is moving its store servers from VMware to Proxmox
A Tesco job advert puts a VMware-to-Proxmox migration across its store estate at the centre of a new engineering role. Tesco is also suing Broadcom over its VMware licences.
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Updates about the directory and European alternatives.
Arc browser stops working on 22 December; its makers want users on their AI browser
The Browser Company, owned by Atlassian, is shutting Arc down. Mobile sync ends on 23 November and the desktop apps stop on 22 December. The closest European browser to Arc's layout is Norway's Vivaldi.
Spotify now makes some Family plan members prove in person that they live together
Some Spotify Family members must now scan a QR code on the plan manager's phone, in the same place, within seven days. Those who fail drop to the free tier and cannot join another Family or Duo plan for a year.
Google adds an exception to its promise not to target ads with Gmail, Drive and Photos content
Since 16 October, Google's privacy policy says content from Gmail, Drive and Google Photos can shape ads once a user connects those apps to Search or Gemini. The feature behind it is not yet offered in Europe; the wording is global.
Quad9 will leave France on 24 November after a Paris court orders DNS blocking
A Paris court ordered the Swiss DNS foundation to block sports-streaming domains for French users. Quad9 says it cannot do that without tracking users, so it is withdrawing from France instead.
A power failure in one London zone took Google Cloud customers offline for eight hours
A power event in Google Cloud's europe-west2-b zone on 20 October took services at Revolut, HSBC, Lloyds and Royal Mail offline for most of a working day. Google Compute Engine is now listed here with four European peers.
UK competition regulator moves to designate Microsoft over its business software
The CMA proposes "strategic market status" for the ecosystem around Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams and Copilot, citing the barriers customers face when switching. A final decision is due by 13 February 2027.
Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri-1, a German reasoning model you can download and run yourself
The Heidelberg lab has published a 78-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model under the Apache 2.0 licence, tuned for German and English and designed to be run on your own hardware. Its own merger with Canada's Cohere has still not closed.
Google's frontier Gemini model is now subscription-only
Gemini 4 Argon went generally available on 14 October — to paying subscribers. Google's free tier is now listed as Flash-Lite only, which moves the comparison with European assistants onto pricing rather than privacy.
Microsoft 365 Family drops from 6 TB of OneDrive storage to 2 TB shared
Family and Premium subscriptions move from 1 TB per person to a single 2 TB pool across up to six members, at the same price.
Munich is replacing VMware with Proxmox, and Jira and Confluence with OpenProject and XWiki
The city puts the two switches at about 1.5 million euro a year. Nine years after abandoning LiMux, open source is written into Munich's procurement rules.
Microsoft cuts Microsoft 365 cloud storage from 6 TB to 2 TB
Family and Premium subscribers lose per-person OneDrive allowances in favour of a single shared 2 TB pool, at the same price.
Ecosia drops Mistral for Chinese open-weight models — but keeps the inference in Europe
Ecosia has replaced Mistral with Qwen, GLM and Kimi after five months, citing quality and cost. The weights are Chinese; the servers are not.
Most VMware customers are considering alternatives. Very few have moved
A sponsored survey found 90 per cent of VMware users weighing alternatives, but a separate study puts completed migrations at 4 per cent. Meanwhile the French company behind XCP-ng raised 30 million euro.
Mistral Large 4 lands in preview, with open weights promised for the end of October
Mistral's largest model yet is a trillion-parameter multimodal mixture of experts with 49 billion active parameters. It is in API preview now, and Mistral says the weights follow by the end of the month.
Tuta Mail arrives in the Nextcloud App Store
Two German providers wire their products together: attachments from Tuta Mail now upload to Nextcloud in one click, and Tuta Calendar events can generate Nextcloud Talk links.
Deutsche Telekom will sell Cloudflare to European businesses, under a sovereignty banner
Europe's largest telecoms operator is adding a US edge platform to its enterprise portfolio and wiring its network straight into it. Both companies describe the deal as serving digital sovereignty.
The Dutch government is building its own desktop out of European open source
The Netherlands has commissioned a NixOS-based government workstation and a self-hosted office suite assembled from Nextcloud, Collabora, Element and OpenProject.
A 260-year-old German legal publisher just took majority control of Noxtua
Noxtua raised more than €100 million in a Series C that handed majority ownership to C.H.BECK, Germany's leading legal publisher. Japanese investors exited in the same round.
Proton's Lumo assistant now runs on Apertus, Switzerland's sovereign open AI model
Proton has wired Apertus — a fully open large language model built by EPFL, ETH Zurich and Switzerland's national supercomputing centre — into its Lumo assistant, so a mass-market European product now runs a model developed and governed in Europe rather than an American one.
Mistral releases OCR 4, a self-hostable document AI for data-sensitive work
Paris-based Mistral AI shipped OCR 4, a document-understanding model that extracts structured text in 170 languages and can run fully self-hosted — letting regulated European organisations process sensitive files without sending them to a US cloud API.
Framer launches version 3.0, putting AI agents inside the website canvas
Framer 3.0 brings AI agents, Git-style branching and external-agent (MCP) support to the design canvas — a European builder pushing to the front of agentic web design.
DeepL buys US live-audio startup Mixhalo and cuts a quarter of its staff
Germany's DeepL has acquired the team behind San Francisco live-audio startup Mixhalo to scale up real-time voice translation — and on the same day confirmed around 250 layoffs, roughly a quarter of its workforce.
Proton Drive gets a command-line client, with a Linux desktop app to follow
Proton has released an official command-line client for Proton Drive on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and confirmed a graphical Linux desktop app is due before year-end.
Euro-Office launches as an open-source rival to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace
A European coalition led by Nextcloud and IONOS has released the first stable version of Euro-Office, an open-source, EU-hosted alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
European Parliament makes Qwant its default search engine
From 4 June 2026 the European Parliament made the French engine Qwant the default search in its Edge and Firefox browsers, replacing Google — a concrete tech-sovereignty win for a European alternative.
Salesforce to buy Contentful, moving a Berlin-born CMS under US ownership
Salesforce has agreed to acquire Contentful, taking the Berlin-founded headless CMS under US ownership — and pointing European buyers toward alternatives like Austria's Storyblok.
TrueLayer buys Dutch fintech In3 to add credit to Pay by Bank
UK open-banking network TrueLayer has acquired Dutch BNPL provider In3, becoming the first Pay-by-Bank rail in Europe to offer both debit and credit at checkout — and tightening the European challenge to card networks.
EU unveils Tech Sovereignty Package targeting US cloud lock-in
The European Commission's 27-May Tech Sovereignty Package bundles a Cloud and AI Development Act and a Chips Act 2.0, with a new four-tier sovereignty rating that directly addresses the US CLOUD Act risk for public-sector cloud customers.
Mistral folds Le Chat into "Vibe" — one agent, one licence, work and code
At AI Now Summit 2026 in Paris, Mistral retired the Le Chat brand and consolidated chat, work, and coding into a single agent called Vibe — alongside an industrial-AI push, the Emmi acquisition, and a 10 MW inference datacenter.
Dust raises $40M Series B as Paris AI workspace hits 3,000 organisations
Sequoia and Abstract Ventures led a $40M Series B for Paris-based AI workspace Dust on 18 May 2026, with Snowflake Ventures and Datadog joining. Permutation Labs SAS now claims around 3,000 organisations on its multi-agent platform.
Lexroom raises $50M, putting two European labs in the global legal-AI race
Milan-based Lexroom's Series B lands six months after Legora's $5.6B valuation, giving Europe two credible alternatives to Harvey in one of AI's most contested verticals.
After Cohere–Aleph Alpha merger, Mistral stands alone as Europe's last independent frontier lab
The April 2026 tie-up between Canada's Cohere and Germany's Aleph Alpha closes one of Europe's two flagship foundation-model labs into a Toronto-led group. Mistral is now the only EU-controlled lab still trying to compete at the frontier.
DeepL cuts 25% of staff in AI restructure, opens San Francisco office
Cologne-based AI translation leader DeepL announced on 7 May 2026 that it will lay off around 250 employees — about 25% of its workforce — to rebuild as an "AI-native" organisation. The cuts coincide with a Voice-to-Voice launch and the company's first US office.
Capital One closes $5.15B Brex acquisition
Capital One's acquisition of corporate-card specialist Brex closed on 7 April 2026, leaving Ramp as the largest independent US peer and refocusing attention on European spend management vendors.
Mistral CEO warns Europe has two years to avoid AI "vassal state" status
In a May 13 hearing before France's National Assembly, Arthur Mensch said Europe must build sovereign chip, energy, and data-center capacity within 24 months — or lose negotiating leverage entirely.
Mistral acquires Austrian Emmi AI, pivots to industrial AI
On May 19, Mistral acquired Linz-based physics-AI startup Emmi AI. The deal anchors a new focus on engineering, manufacturing, and physical simulation — and a clear bet on where Europe's AI edge actually lies.
Yann LeCun launches AMI Labs in Paris with a $1B bet against LLMs
Meta's former chief AI scientist has set up his new lab in Paris. AMI Labs raised $1.03 billion in March on a contrarian bet that "world models", not larger language models, are the path to general intelligence.