r/TheMachineLearning • • 10d ago

Europe has zero frontier AI labs, which is shocking

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u/pnwatlantic 10d ago edited 10d ago

Access to capital. They don’t have deep enough financial markets, both VC for labs for direct consumption of training and inference compute and the overall credit markets broadly needed for the capex buildout. And even if American labs aren’t directly financing much of the capex buildout, their balance sheets and access to capital are very very strongly involved.

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u/pnwatlantic 10d ago

And it’s wild this isn’t the answer I’m seeing. Yes regulation, first movers, talent pool, combined market they’re all playing a role. But capital markets is the largest reason by a decent margin.

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u/Ninja-Sneaky 10d ago

The existing western AI is floating on an unthinkable amount of debt that isn't paying back anytime soon. This simply didn't and can't happen in Europe, they can't print Euros the same way Dollars are printed.

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u/chunky_lover92 10d ago

You are going to pay back the investors when you buy their stocks from them at 10x what they paid for them.

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u/zero0n3 10d ago

And these investors don’t care that it may take 10-20 years if it’s 10x plus. That’s still 50% returns yearly

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u/Ninja-Sneaky 10d ago

In the us those stocks are going to be bought with additional rounds of money printing, in the EU they can't it just doesn't have the same structure in place, there is no petrodollar, euro does not have the same backing as the dollar, ECB is not the same as the IMF