The Silicon vs. Scale Map: Europe’s AI Brain Drain
Europe produces more AI professionals per head than America. But they keep leaving for San Francisco.
Peter Steinberger is Austrian. He spent 13 years building PSPDFKit, burned out, came back, built 43 projects that went nowhere. Number 44 was OpenClaw: 196,000 GitHub stars in three months. For weeks, OpenClaw was the counter-narrative: you can build sovereign AI agents without the giants.
Yesterday, Steinberger joined OpenAI.
He moves to San Francisco to build “the next generation of personal agents.” Markus Raunig put it well: “We keep proudly applauding world class talent on the way out.”
Look at the numbers: → US AI venture investment: $60-70B per year → EU AI venture investment: $7-8B per year → Foundation models: US 40. China 15. Europe 3.
Europe produces the talent. America produces the gravity. When the capital, the compute and the mission are all in one city, talent doesn’t emigrate. It falls.
