Artificial Intelligence

AWS Executive Warns Europe Risks Losing Startups to Funding and Skills Gaps

Tanuja Randery says regulation, funding and skills barriers threaten European startup growth. AWS-backed research found 38% of surveyed startups would consider moving outside Europe to scale.

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Oct 22, 2026 - 07:44

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Office-workspace illustration. This is not an identified AWS facility or survey respondent. Photo via Pexels.

AWS Executive Warns Europe Risks Losing Startups to Funding and Skills Gaps

Europe risks losing promising startups unless it addresses obstacles to scaling, according to AWS EMEA managing director Tanuja Randery. In a Reuters interview, she pointed to regulatory complexity, insufficient funding and workforce skills gaps as barriers to stronger AI adoption.

The warning concerns a risk of future departures, not evidence that a mass relocation has already happened.

What the AWS-backed survey found

Randery cited research commissioned by AWS that examined 17,000 European businesses. Amazon’s published account says 38% of surveyed startups would consider moving outside Europe to scale, rising to 51% among the highest-growth startups.

Those responses measure willingness to consider relocation. They do not establish how many firms have chosen a destination, committed to moving or actually left.

The same research reported that 54% of businesses use AI. Among AI adopters, 22% had reached advanced use, such as embedding the technology into core processes or building custom solutions. That is a narrower measure than simply trying an AI tool.

From experimentation to deployment

Randery told Reuters that European businesses should invest more in inference: running trained models to produce outputs in real-world applications. Her emphasis was on operational deployment rather than only building larger frontier models.

She also argued that faster progress need not mean abandoning safety. AWS’s published proposals include easier access to growth capital, more public-sector adoption and investment in AI literacy.

The figures and recommendations come from a cloud and AI-infrastructure provider with a commercial stake in wider adoption. They provide a reported business perspective on Europe’s scaling challenges, rather than an independent count of startup departures or a finding that regulation alone causes them.