While the industry announced fabs and contracts, regulators in Europe and China advanced new rules for the sector, a movement running parallel to capacity expansion.
The mismatch in pace is the most relevant feature. Fab decisions are measured in years and so are regulatory ones, but the market both try to follow changes in weeks, producing rules written for a landscape that has already moved by the time they take effect.
In Europe, the direction taken was documentary obligation: providers of general-purpose models must document information, maintain a copyright policy and publish a summary of training material.
On the other side, the Chinese strategy announced in the period is infrastructural, with a national five-year plan and replacement of foreign suppliers by local technology.
Two distinct models of response to the same fact: whoever controls compute capacity controls the pace of everyone depending on it.