Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 9 September 2026
For sixty years, the semiconductor industry has treated waste heat as physics — an unavoidable tax on every calculation. Hannah Earley, a 31-year-old British engineer and cofounder of Vaire Computing, believes it is a design choice. Her startup is building chips based on "reversible computing," a theoretical framework dating back to the 1960s that has never been commercially viable — until now.
The principle is deceptively simple. Conventional chips erase information at every logic gate, and each erasure dissipates energy as heat. Reversible computing preserves information through the gate, allowing the energy to be recycled rather than thrown away. In thermodynamic terms, it sidesteps Landauer's limit — the minimum energy cost of erasing a bit. In practical terms, it means chips that could run orders of magnitude cooler and more efficiently than anything on the market.
Vaire has been working largely in stealth, but Earley's appearance on MIT Technology Review's 2026 Innovators Under 35 list has brought the approach into view. The timing is not accidental. Global data centre electricity consumption is growing at roughly 25–30 percent per year, driven overwhelmingly by AI training and inference workloads. The International Energy Agency warned earlier this year that data centres could consume more electricity than Japan by 2030. Cooling alone accounts for 30–40 percent of a typical facility's energy bill. The industry's current answer — bigger grids, more nuclear, immersion cooling — addresses symptoms. Earley's approach attacks the disease.
Reversible computing has been dismissed by mainstream chip designers for decades because the engineering overhead of preserving information makes circuits slower and more complex. Earley's insight, according to MIT Tech Review, is that modern fabrication techniques and new materials have finally closed the gap enough to make the trade-off worthwhile — particularly for the repetitive, massively parallel workloads that define AI inference. A chip that recycles ninety percent of its energy doesn't need ninety percent of the cooling infrastructure. The economics cascade from there.
Vaire is not the only team exploring this space, but it appears to be the furthest along toward a commercial product. The startup is based in the UK and France. Earley studied at Cambridge and previously worked on quantum computing hardware — a field where energy dissipation is not merely expensive but physically destructive to the computation itself. That background informs her conviction that heat is not a cost of computing but a failure of design.
The implications stretch beyond data centres. Edge computing — chips in cars, phones, satellites, medical implants — is constrained less by processing power than by thermal budgets. A chip that barely heats up could run in places where today's processors cannot survive. If Earley is right, the bottleneck on AI deployment shifts from energy supply to imagination.
Source: MIT Technology Review · 8 September 2026
Now: Data centres already consume roughly 2–3 percent of global electricity and the share is climbing fast. Every major cloud provider is scrambling for power: Microsoft has signed nuclear deals, Amazon is buying entire wind farms, Google is exploring geothermal. These are supply-side fixes to a demand-side problem. Vaire's reversible computing approach, if it scales, would reduce the demand itself — a fundamentally different lever. For AI companies spending billions on electricity and cooling, even a partial breakthrough would reshape capital expenditure overnight.
Soon: Within three to five years, the regulatory environment around data centre energy use will tighten sharply. The EU's Energy Efficiency Directive already requires reporting; binding caps are being discussed. Singapore has imposed a moratorium on new facilities. Ireland's grid operator has rejected data centre applications. Chip architectures that can demonstrate radically lower energy profiles will command premium pricing and regulatory favour. Reversible computing could become not just efficient but mandatory — the only way to build in jurisdictions that have run out of electrons to spare.
Later: The deeper shift is philosophical. The entire history of computing has been built on the assumption that energy is cheap and abundant. That assumption is breaking. If reversible computing matures, it enables a world where computation is nearly free at the margin — not because energy is unlimited but because each joule does vastly more work. That world looks different: AI inference at the network edge, in low-power environments, in developing countries without grid infrastructure. The geography of intelligence changes. The question stops being "who has the biggest data centre" and becomes "who has the best chip design." Hardware, not kilowatts, becomes the scarce resource. Source: MIT Technology Review · 8 September 2026; IEA World Energy Outlook data ---
Algeria dispatched an air force contingent to Niger on 30 August to help suppress an attempted coup — the first time Algiers has sent military forces beyond its borders anywhere on the African continent. The move breaks a decades-old doctrine of non-intervention that has defined Algerian foreign policy since independence. Niger's junta, which itself seized power in 2023, is now being propped up by the very neighbour that historically refused to take sides in Sahelian conflicts. The shift signals that Algeria views instability on its southern border as an existential threat — particularly as France, the former colonial patron, has been expelled from much of the region and Russia's Wagner Group has filled some of the vacuum. What changed, according to The Africa Report, is the combination of jihadi resurgence, migration flows, and the risk that a second coup in Niger could create a failed state on Algeria's doorstep. Source: The Africa Report · 8 September 2026
President Adama Barrow pledged emergency power infrastructure, including a new 24-megawatt plant, after violent protests erupted across Gambia over rolling blackouts that have left large parts of the country without electricity for days. The tiny West African nation has long suffered from chronic power shortages, but the current crisis has been exacerbated by ageing infrastructure and rising fuel costs. Barrow's pledge is a familiar script in a country where previous power promises have gone unfulfilled. The protests mark a rare moment of open anger directed at a president who came to power promising a break from Yahya Jammeh's autocratic past. Source: Al Jazeera · 8 September 2026
The United States banned imports of Canadian dairy products, motorcycles, and most alcoholic beverages — a sharp escalation in the trade conflict that came just one day after Ottawa imposed $20 billion in retaliatory tariffs on American goods. The move transforms what had been a tariff dispute into something closer to a selective embargo, targeting Canadian industries that are both economically significant and politically symbolic in key provinces. Dairy is the lifeblood of Quebec's agricultural economy; whisky dominates in Alberta and Ontario. The ban signals that Washington is willing to weaponise consumer goods to force concessions, a tactic that risks entrenching Canadian public opinion against any deal. For the broader global trading system, the spectacle of the world's largest bilateral trade relationship descending into tit-for-tat product bans is a warning: if the US and Canada cannot maintain open commerce, the post-war trading order's remaining credibility thins further. Source: Financial Times, BBC World · 8 September 2026
Malaysia charged UMNO politician Abdul Azeez Abdul Rahim with graft over the management of the country's Muslim pilgrimage fund, Tabung Haji — escalating tensions within Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim's fragile multi-coalition government. UMNO is the largest Malay party in Anwar's alliance, and prosecuting one of its senior figures risks fracturing the coalition. The case echoes the 1MDB scandal that brought down a previous government and tests whether Anwar's anti-corruption promises extend to his own allies. Source: Bloomberg · 8 September 2026
The 2025 PISA results show the steepest global decline in student reading and mathematics performance in the assessment's 25-year history. US reading scores hit a near-25-year low, dropping 14 points from 2022. Spain recorded its worst-ever results. Even the perennial top performers — Japan, South Korea, Estonia — fell sharply. The OECD identifies three drivers: students read less, show less willingness to persevere through difficult tasks, and have grown up with smartphones. France's poor results have already become a campaign issue for the 2027 presidential election. The data suggest that the post-pandemic learning loss was not a temporary dip but a structural shift. Source: Al Jazeera, El País, Le Monde · 8 September 2026
Pakistan assumed the rotating chairmanship of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation at a moment when the bloc's relevance is being tested by its own contradictions — a club that includes both India and China, and now Russia under sanctions. Islamabad is expected to use its term to push connectivity routes via Iran and Central Asia linking the Belt and Road Initiative to the Arabian Sea. The timing is delicate: regional instability makes those routes both more valuable and more precarious, and Pakistan's own economic fragility limits its leverage. Source: The Diplomat · 8 September 2026
A new generation of African-owned oil companies — led by Dangote, Sahara Group, and Morocco's Afriquia — is moving aggressively into refining, trading, and distribution, markets long dominated by Shell, TotalEnergies, and BP. Dangote's Lagos refinery, now cleared for an IPO, is the continent's largest. Sahara Group has expanded into gas trading across West Africa. The shift is structural: as European majors retreat from African upstream operations under ESG pressure, local players are filling the vacuum — not in exploration, where capital requirements remain prohibitive, but in the higher-margin downstream business of turning crude into fuel and selling it. Source: The Africa Report · 8 September 2026
India is approaching one of the world's largest intergenerational wealth transfers, but the challenge extends far beyond who inherits the money. Bloomberg reports that the country's family-run conglomerates — which dominate everything from steel to telecom to aviation — face a governance problem: control structures, often built around a single patriarch, are not designed to survive the transition to the next generation. The Ambani, Adani, Tata, and Birla empires all face this question simultaneously. In a country where family businesses account for roughly two-thirds of GDP, a botched handover is not a private matter — it is a macroeconomic risk. Source: Bloomberg · 8 September 2026 ---
In the United States, a $1.7 billion industry exists for the sole purpose of preventing workers from organising. According to the Department of Labor, some 75 percent of employers hire specialised union-avoidance consultants the moment employees begin to talk about collective bargaining. The consultants run playbooks — mandatory meetings, one-on-one intimidation sessions, legal delays — and until recently, workers had no way of knowing what was being spent against them or what tactics to expect.
Now a group of labour organisers and technologists has built a tool they call a "union-busting calculator" — an open-access digital platform that lets workers see, in real time, how much their employer is likely spending on anti-union efforts and what specific strategies those consultants typically deploy. The tool pulls from public filings, Labor Department disclosures, and crowdsourced data from past organising campaigns. It names the consulting firms, estimates the fees, and provides a tactical breakdown of common employer responses at each stage of a union drive.
The genius is not the technology — it is the asymmetry it corrects. The consultants' power derives from opacity. Workers who have never organised before don't know that the mandatory all-hands meeting with the "labour relations specialist" is a scripted performance costing their employer $3,000 an hour. They don't know that the delay tactics have names and playbooks. The calculator strips that fog away.
This is a small team with no venture backing using publicly available information to crack open one of the most profitable and least scrutinised consulting industries in America. They are not asking for legislation. They are not lobbying. They built a tool that makes the establishment's tactics visible — and visibility, in an information asymmetry, is the most dangerous weapon of all.
Source: Fast Company · 8 September 2026
Brazilian artist Regina Silveira, now in her eighties and one of the country's most important living artists, will cover the entire façade of the Sesi Lab in Brasília — a building designed by Oscar Niemeyer — with an enormous installation of adhesive vinyl patterns that mimic the texture of sewn fabric. The work transforms a monument of modernist architecture into something tactile, domestic, almost subversive. Silveira has spent decades exploring the tension between monumental space and intimate perception. Wrapping Niemeyer's concrete in the visual language of needlework is a quiet act of artistic defiance. Source: Folha de São Paulo · 8 September 2026
New York artist Lucien Smith, who burst onto the art market in his early twenties with "Rain Paintings" made by firing pigment from extinguishers at canvas, has died at 37. Smith emerged from a generation of young painters who commanded auction prices before they had fully developed their practice — a phenomenon that said as much about the market as about the art. His later work moved toward quieter, more deliberate abstraction. His death at such a young age closes a chapter that the art world never quite figured out how to read. Source: Artnet News · 8 September 2026
The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded for research that "makes people laugh, then think," honoured studies including the nutritional properties of cockroach milk (which is, indeed, more protein-rich than cow's milk) and the development of a biological printer that uses mosquito proboscises as micro-needles. The ceremony, held as always at MIT, is a reminder that the boundary between absurd and important is thinner than peer review suggests. Cockroach milk crystals are being seriously investigated as a sustainable protein source. The mosquito printer could enable painless drug delivery. Source: Wired · 8 September 2026
Danish furniture brand OMHU released a deliberately cheap, intentionally misspelled version of its own Teddy sofa — the "Tedy" — on third-party websites at a fraction of the original price. The move is a marketing stunt and a provocation aimed at the knockoff industry that has proliferated on platforms like Amazon and Temu. By beating the copiers at their own game, OMHU forces consumers to confront the absurdity of the dupe economy while generating press coverage no advertising budget could buy. Source: Dezeen · 8 September 2026
Osaka Metro has announced it will phase out magnetic paper tickets entirely by fiscal 2031, replacing them with QR codes. It sounds like a minor operational decision, but Japan's rail system is one of the world's last bastions of analogue ticketing — a country where physical ritual still carries cultural weight. The shift signals that even in Japan, where tradition and technology coexist with unusual patience, the economics of maintaining legacy infrastructure have finally tipped. Source: The Japan Times · 8 September 2026
Monocle's latest essay argues that the abusive kitchen culture depicted in Anthony Bourdain's memoirs is too often excused as a product of "different times" — the 1990s — when in fact the rules of basic human decency were neither unknown nor new. The piece pushes back against the nostalgia industry that has grown around Bourdain's legacy, insisting that romanticising toxicity under the banner of authenticity is a choice, not an inevitability. The argument extends beyond kitchens: every industry that excuses past cruelty as era-appropriate is performing the same sleight of hand. Source: Monocle · 8 September 2026 ---
Cognition, the startup behind the AI software engineer Devin, has raised a new round at a $48 billion valuation — a multiple higher than Cursor's was before Cursor sold to SpaceX. The figure is extraordinary not because a single AI coding company is valued this highly, but because of what it implies about investor conviction: the market for AI-assisted software development is not winner-take-all. Cursor, Copilot, Devin, and a dozen smaller entrants are all raising at escalating valuations simultaneously. The bet is that every developer will use an AI coding tool, but no single tool will dominate — a market structure closer to databases or cloud platforms than to search engines. For the broader software industry, the implications are unsettling. If AI coding assistants become ubiquitous, the value of writing code shifts from the act itself to the judgment of what to build and why. Junior developer roles — the traditional apprenticeship path — face compression. But the $48 billion valuation also contains an implicit admission: the tools are not yet good enough to replace human developers entirely. If they were, a single winner would have emerged. The crowd of well-funded competitors suggests the technology is powerful but immature — capable enough to justify enormous investment, incomplete enough that the design space remains wide open. Source: TechCrunch · 8 September 2026
Anthropic has warned Claude subscribers that hackers are exploiting stolen API tokens to siphon conversations and consume paid usage without the user's knowledge. One user reported noticing token consumption on his account during hours he wasn't working. The vulnerability highlights a growing problem as AI assistants become repositories of sensitive personal and professional information. Unlike a hacked email account — where the damage is visible — a compromised AI assistant leaks context, reasoning patterns, and strategic thinking that may never appear in a traditional document. The attack surface of AI is not just data; it is cognition. Source: TechCrunch · 8 September 2026
Clinical trials in both the US and China are testing nanodrug injections that could replace daily cholesterol pills with a single shot that keeps LDL cholesterol suppressed for a year, a decade, or potentially permanently. The approach uses lipid nanoparticles — the same technology that enabled mRNA Covid vaccines — to deliver gene-editing tools that silence the PCSK9 gene in the liver. Early results show dramatic LDL reductions sustained over months. Heart disease is the world's leading killer, and statins — the current standard — require daily adherence that millions of patients fail to maintain. A one-shot solution doesn't just improve outcomes; it removes the single biggest variable in treatment: human behaviour. Source: South China Morning Post · 8 September 2026 ---
48,000,000,000
$48,000,000,000
That is Cognition's new valuation — for a startup whose product, the AI software engineer Devin, is one of at least a dozen well-funded entrants in the AI coding market. The number is not a bet on Cognition alone. It is a bet on a category.
The AI coding tools market barely existed three years ago. Today it has produced multiple companies valued above $10 billion, and the total venture capital deployed into the space exceeds $100 billion. The economics are seductive: there are roughly 30 million professional software developers worldwide, each costing their employer an average of $100,000–$200,000 per year. A tool that makes each developer even 20 percent more productive is worth, in aggregate, hundreds of billions in saved labour costs. The valuations, absurd as they appear, are backed by arithmetic.
But the number also reveals a tension. If AI coding tools become as essential as the investors believe, the profession they serve will transform beyond recognition. The $48 billion valuation assumes a world in which millions of developers still exist and still need assistance. If the tools improve to the point where they don't, the customers vanish along with the market. Cognition is worth $48 billion precisely because the problem it solves is not yet fully solved. The moment it is, the valuation model breaks.
Source: TechCrunch · 8 September 2026
In perspective
That is Cognition's new valuation — for a startup whose product, the AI software engineer Devin, is one of at least a dozen well-funded entrants in the AI coding market. The number is not a bet on Cognition alone. It is a bet on a category. The AI coding...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Hannah Earley is 31 years old and is building a chip that recycles its own heat. Not through better cooling, not through finding more electricity, but by stopping the waste of energy in the first place. That is the most entrepreneurial instinct there is: refusing to accept that a problem is a law of nature just because everyone treats it like one.
The entire data center industry is currently chasing power plants. Microsoft is buying nuclear power, Amazon is buying wind farms, Google is drilling for geothermal energy. These are impressive mobilizations, but they're solving the wrong side of the equation. They're building bigger buckets to catch more water instead of sealing the leak. Earley is sealing the leak.
I've seen that pattern in every industry I've worked in. When a problem seems unsolvable, it's almost never because the physics won't allow a solution, but because the industry has stopped questioning its own assumptions. For sixty years, the chip industry has accepted that computation must produce heat. Earley went back to a theory from the 1960s that everyone had dismissed as impractical and asked herself whether modern materials and manufacturing methods had changed the calculus. They had.
That's how breakthroughs actually work. Not by throwing more resources at old architectures, but by a stubborn builder refusing to accept the premise. The future doesn't belong to those with the most electricity. It belongs to those who need the least.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai