By PYMNTS | October 21, 2026
An Amazon Web Services executive said Wednesday (Oct. 21) that nearly 4 in 10 European startups, and over half of the fastest-growing ones, have told the company that they would consider leaving the region to scale, Reuters reported Wednesday (Oct. 21).
“Startups say to us that they’re reconsidering locations because they want funding and support, and they’re not getting enough funding here,” Tanuja Randery, AWS EMEA managing director, told Reuters in an interview.
Randery said that European businesses have told AWS that regulatory compliance costs them as much as 40 cents per euro; that the European Union’s AI Act limits their efforts in artificial intelligence frontier research and AI infrastructure; and that severe energy and grid constraints are also blocking progress around AI.
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CNBC reported in January 2025 that European CEOs were calling for investment in AI infrastructure after President Donald Trump announced Stargate, a $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure in the United States.
Schneider Electric CEO Olivier Blum said in the report that governments should cooperate on AI because companies are increasingly global.
“So, government also has to understand that if they want to have their own domestic companies to be successful outside their home country, they need to find some common agreement,” Blum said.
PYMNTS reported in January 2025 that France’s first minister of AI, Clara Chappaz, urged EU officials not to get “stuck” on the idea of regulating just to regulate, but rather see regulation as a springboard to innovation.
During the same panel discussion on which Chappaz spoke, IBM CEO and Chairman Arvind Krishna said that regulations should be a “light touch” but the EU AI Act is “a sledgehammer.”
The European Central Bank (ECB) published research in June that found that while 70% of companies in the euro area were AI users, very few were deploying the technology “intensively.”
“Nearly half of the firms that were not using AI in 2025 plan to invest in it in 2026,” the ECB said at the time in a blog post. “At the same time, most firms report using AI only infrequently or moderately, with only 7% of euro area firms reporting intensive use.”