Silicon Valley has scale. 🇨🇭 Zurich has something harder to copy.
( Post of Marc Walder ) Eight of the world's most influential technology companies run research centres in a city of just about 450,000 people: Apple , Anthropic , Disney Research , Google , Meta , Microsoft , NVIDIA and OpenAI . Roughly half the size of San Francisco. For a long time the assumption was that breakthroughs follow scale. More talent, more capital, more space. Zurich works differently. The advantage is density: how close the people who depend on each other actually are, and how fast ideas move between them. Google engineers teach at ETH Zürich . Their students join Anthropic. Researchers become founders. The distance between research, capital and application is measured in minutes, not hours, and the knowledge keeps circulating inside the ecosystem instead of leaking out of it. The numbers back it up: - Switzerland ranks first in the world for AI researchers and inventors per capita (Stanford AI Index 2026). - ETH Zurich produced more than 40 spin-offs in 2...