Stripe data: Europeans are less likely than Americans to pay for AI but spend more when they do, and Switzerland leads on both

What's the deal? Europe clearly trails the US in AI infrastructure and models, but Stripe's payments data suggests the gap is much smaller where AI gets built into products and used. In an analysis published on 28 October, Stripe economist Marisa Rama splits AI into layers and finds that "for those that eat the cake—consumers and businesses—the differences between Europe and the US disappear almost entirely."

Consumers: Across 34 popular paid consumer AI tools, paid adoption in the EU is about 60% of the US level, which Rama says amounts to only a few percentage points; the UK tracks the US almost exactly. People in Europe and the UK who do pay spend more per month than Americans, though that may reflect keener early adopters. Switzerland is the outlier on both counts, with adoption "almost twice the US average for certain paid AI tools." On Stripe's chart (August 2026, US average = 1), Switzerland sits at about 1.4 on adoption and 1.25 on spend; the Netherlands and Sweden have the highest spend among EU countries, while Italy and Spain have the lowest adoption.

Builders: US AI application companies on Stripe, those that do not train their own models, earn roughly 7x as much revenue as EU peers and 15x as much as UK ones; adjusted for economy size, that is 5x and 2x. The gap comes mainly from numbers, not size: the US has about five times as many AI companies, but they are on average only 50% larger. Where Europe falls short is breakouts: US AI companies are more than twice as likely to pass $1 million in revenue within 12 months of signing up (about 0.5% of companies, against 0.2% in Europe and the UK).

Businesses: About 22% of businesses in both the US and the EU use AI coding tools to integrate Stripe (19% in the UK), a sign that founders on both sides of the Atlantic use agentic coding in equal measure. Established firms are another story: in early 2025, 4% of EU firms with more than 10 employees used AI in producing goods or services, against 6% in the US, where the figure has since passed 8%.

The signal: None of this offsets Europe's weak spots further down the stack. Rama notes European electricity costs more than double US prices, the US has more data centre capacity than the next 14 countries combined, and no European model makes the top 20 of the main rankings. But for founders and investors, the application layer and adoption look far less one-sided than the "Europe is losing AI" story suggests. Writer Simon Grimm's post of the Switzerland chart drew more than 65,000 views on X.

Read more: Stripe Economics, Simon Grimm (X)

Image credit: Stripe Economics