You know there was a lab that was cutting edge in Europe and it is still there - Deepmind - but the UK let it be sold to the US for a fraction of what it's worth today - $400m. We just allow US companies to asset strip the EU and then people complain about us never having big companies here...
Deepmind would likely be worth conservatively $200 BILLION today (probably more without the overheads of joining Google to be honest) or around 500 times the sale price in 2014, not a bad return.