They have offices in Europe to tap into the low cost talent in the area, nothing more.

And why are their headquarters in silicon valley except to exploit the local talent pool? With the exception of actual manufacturing, every site decision in a tech company is about labor availability.

So Europe gets value from tech in proportion to its concentration of talent, same as everyone else. Is Europe falling behind on tech talent? Clearly not. So it'll do just fine (where conversely the bay area is largely tapped out at this point, there's no place to put more talent even if it could find it).

An additional reason for the location could be that vcs/founders are located there.

I have seen a similar pattern, where a company has an office in an unusual place because one of the founders lives there, and does not want to relocate.

Companies expand from where they are founded to reach new labor markets, but that's not the only consideration for where they begin. Startups are founded in SV (and other tech hubs both in and out of the US) because it's an intersection of high quality talent, permissive laws that make it easy to do business (although that doesn't appear to be the case in SV anymore), capital that's willing and able to fund startups, and network effects of being next to loads of other tech companies. Europe is missing pretty much all of that outside talent, and many would argue that even that is questionable because of the typical European work ethic.

"Founding" and "located in" are rather different though. I take this discussion to be about "Does Europe get a reasonable share of world tech revenue and activity?". And, duh, yes it does. It just doesn't have the Googleplex or Apple's weird circle thing.

Didn't they do the very same thing in Asia 15-20 years before?

They have offices in Sillicon Valley to tap into the desire of the locals to work themselves to death by the age of 35, so that they can hopefully retire before they die in order to reclaim back the health they lost while trying to "make it." Nothing more.

Low cost? Amsterdam? I wish.

That is definitely true for most large European cities, and that is where lots of the offices are.

Switzerland is definitely not low cost. And it's where the majority of innovation happens at FAANG Europeans office.

Truth is, these offices are mostly there to be able to use L1 visas.

By the time you include corporation and employment taxes, I'd be surprised if the "total cost of employment" per employee was much different in Europe.

Or...perhaps a lot of very highly skilled engineers and researchers? London isn't where you set up shop for "low cost talent"