Google DeepMind AI talent share in Europe plunges from 49% to 18.6%
Google DeepMind spent years as the undisputed magnet for Europe’s top machine-learning minds. That grip is now slipping fast. New data shared exclusively with Fortune shows the lab’s share of research and advanced-engineering hires across Europe, the Middle East and Africa has collapsed from 49% in 2022-23 to just 18.6% in 2025-26, the sharpest regional market-share drop recorded for any major AI lab. The shift in Google DeepMind AI talent flows marks one of the clearest signs yet that the company once seen as the industry’s research powerhouse is losing the war for the people who actually build frontier models.
Key takeaways
- DeepMind’s share of EMEA research and advanced-engineering hires fell from 49% in 2022-23 to 18.6% in 2025-26, according to data from Zeki Data.
- DeepMind’s arrival-to-departure ratio dropped from about 12-to-1 in mid-2023 to roughly 2-to-1 by the third quarter of 2026, versus 22-to-1 at Anthropic in 2025.
- Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le departed this month, while co-founder Demis Hassabis stepped back from day-to-day control of the lab.
- Of DeepMind staff who left in the past 12 months, 25% moved to Anthropic, 21% to Meta and 14% to OpenAI.
- DeepMind is losing ground in large language models, multimodal systems and computer vision, but still leads in robotics, embodied AI and scientific machine learning.
DeepMind’s Shrinking Share of Europe’s AI Talent Pool
The numbers tell a story of a lab that once had the field to itself and now shares it with much hungrier rivals. Zeki Data, a UK-based data intelligence company, tracked research and advanced-engineering roles across companies using public records. Among the findings: DeepMind’s EMEA hiring share fell significantly in just three years, while OpenAI and Anthropic pulled ahead in the race for the same pool of specialists.
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