Money · Research
For every $1 EU AI companies make on Stripe, US ones make $31
Stripe posted a chart of AI payment volume with the numbers taken off. We measured it with a ruler. The US now makes $31 for every $1 in the EU, up from $23 in January 2023.
On 24 September Stripe posted a chart: monthly payment volume of AI businesses on Stripe, US against EU, by where the company has its headquarters. Pieter Levels shared it with the caption "Jesus christ" and 1.4 million people looked at it.
The chart has no numbers on the axis. Stripe left them off. So we measured the two lines pixel by pixel against the zero line, month by month, from January 2023 to May 2026.
The gap went from 23 to 1 to 31 to 1
In January 2023 US AI companies on Stripe made about $23 for every $1 their EU peers made. By May 2026 it was $31. The US line grew 6.1 times over those 41 months.
The "flat" EU line grew 4.5 times
Levels' post says the EU "stays flat". EU AI payment volume grew 4.5 times since January 2023. On a chart drawn to US scale, a line that starts at 1/23 of the other one looks like a floorboard no matter what it does.
The US is speeding up, the EU is slowing down
| 12 months to | US growth | EU growth |
|---|---|---|
| May 2024 | +49% | +59% |
| May 2025 | +73% | +56% |
| May 2026 | +86% | +45% |
In the first year the EU actually grew faster. Since then the US has sped up every year and the EU has slowed. That, more than the size gap, is the scary part of the chart.
One month shows it best. In March 2026 the US line jumped 19%. That one-month increase was five times the EU's entire monthly volume.
As a sanity check: Stripe wrote in August that AI spending by US customers grew 91% a year. We get 86% for US-headquartered companies. Close enough to trust the ruler.
Before you tweet it
- This is where companies are headquartered, not where founders come from. A Paris team that moved its HQ to Delaware counts as US. Stripe's own deck has a chart on that: moves from the EU to the US run at about 3 per 10,000 businesses on Stripe, against about 1 per 10,000 the other way.
- The UK and Switzerland are not in the EU line.
- It only counts money that goes through Stripe. EU companies on Adyen, Mollie or Paddle are missing.
- We assume the axis starts at zero, as it does on the labelled charts in the same deck. The EU line sits 7 to 30 pixels above it, so a half-pixel reading error moves the EU growth figure between 4.2x and 4.8x.
Method
Stripe's chart image (1,555 × 1,187 px) from its "Entrepreneurship and industry in Europe" page, 24 September 2026 · line centres measured per month, 41 months · data and script: CSV, digitize.py, CC BY 4.0