What the past six months have looked like from inside the deals, the boardrooms, and the conversations nobody quite has the answer to yet.
Something has shifted. Across enough conversations, enough companies, and enough deals that it is hard to ignore now.
Over the past six months, we have sat with founders who are building faster than ever and feel genuinely uncertain about what that means. We have sat with investors trying to figure out where risk actually lives in a portfolio when the technology underneath a company can change in months. We have sat with operators who have made smart decisions on infrastructure and still found themselves exposed in ways they did not anticipate.
When the US government restricted access to two Anthropic models for non-American users earlier this year, it landed differently depending on where you were sitting. For some it was a footnote. For others it was the moment a theoretical risk became a very practical one.
The picture that emerges is not one of crisis. It is one of complexity that is arriving faster than the frameworks to handle it.
AI is doing what it was always going to do: it is compressing timelines, shifting leverage, and making some things that used to matter much less important, and some things that seemed stable suddenly fragile.
“Everyone would say they’ve built their setup in a flexible way. But is it really though?”
Rasmus Møller-Nielsen, CEO & Co-founder, Lab08.
The companies that are thriving are not necessarily the ones that predicted this correctly. They are the ones that stayed close to their customers, protected what was genuinely defensible, and kept moving.
What has become clearer is that the layer underneath all of it. The infrastructure, the models, the platforms. And these are largely not European.
This has always been true. What is different now is that the geopolitical context around it is shifting in ways that are starting to show up in real decisions. Not as dealbreakers yet, but as questions that were not being asked a year or two ago.
From where Lab08 works inside the tech due diligence on Nordic deals, this shift has become hard to miss.
“If it relates directly to losing customers or losing deals, that’s when it becomes a boardroom topic.”
Rasmus Møller-Nielsen, CEO & Co-founder, Lab08.
The moment when infrastructure choices become commercial consequences is arriving for more companies. And the honest answer is that nobody has a clean solution. The founders are focused on survival and growth. The investors are balancing risk with return. The structural alternatives are years away from being real options.
What feels most true right now is that the companies navigating this best are not waiting for the perfect answer. They are mapping their dependencies, understanding what they actually control, and making conscious choices rather than default ones.
That is not a small thing. In a period where the default is to just move fast and figure it out later, paying attention to what you are building on – and who owns it – turns out to matter quite a lot.
