Nope, it's not. Some of the big names in the current AI boom are also European but they go do it in USA because the money is in USA and they can just access the EU markets from there.
I don't know if you are familiar with coding or engineering but it's nor really a kind of a profession where you work all the time and the more hours you put in it the output increases linearly.
It's not like Europeans couldn't code Facebook because they were taking too many vacations, unlike Russians and Chinese that did. It's that Chinese and Russian markets had restriction and local clones or alternatives were able to flourish but EU had completely open market for US "tech".
Cut off Meta, double the vacations in EU and in a year there will be European social media. As it was demonstrated by Elon Musk, you don't need that many people to work in those "tech" companies anyway.
I don't know if you are familiar with coding or engineering but it's nor really a kind of a profession where you work all the time and the more hours you put in it the output increases linearly.
It's not like Europeans couldn't code Facebook because they were taking too many vacations, unlike Russians and Chinese that did. It's that Chinese and Russian markets had restriction and local clones or alternatives were able to flourish but EU had completely open market for US "tech".
Cut off Meta, double the vacations in EU and in a year there will be European social media. As it was demonstrated by Elon Musk, you don't need that many people to work in those "tech" companies anyway.