One of the professors at my university, after he worked as one of the leading ALU designers at intel for some years, founded a company focused on general purpose computing extension cards for PCs, which he later sold, and made a fortune with – all of that outside of Germany. He only came back when he lost his money (which he invested) during the dotCom crash. Now he’s teaching here, and one of our best professors in chip design and digital engineering.

As you said, a lot of the stuff happens outside of europe currently, but that’s also due to extreme electricity prices.