In Paris, the largest startup hub in Europe does not just want to produce companies - it wants to keep them at home. Station F, the campus founded by French billionaire Xavier Niel, is opening the second generation of its F/ai program, dedicated exclusively to startups in the field of artificial intelligence.

The numbers from the first generation speak for themselves: 20 startups, aiming to reach one million euros in revenue in six months. Entry is not by application - you get in only by referral. Eighty percent of the founders were repeat entrepreneurs, and a third hold a doctorate. Together, the first generation raised 34 million dollars in seed funding. The program's partners are almost all the big names - Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, AWS, Mistral, AMD.

But behind the numbers stands a bigger ambition, and it is as political as it is commercial. Roxanne Varza, director of Station F, put the problem directly: "Today, if founders here want to talk to people at that level, everyone thinks they have to go to the US." The goal of F/ai is precisely to change that habit - to prove that a European startup can succeed without fleeing across the ocean.

This is a story the Balkan entrepreneur understands perfectly. Every talented engineer from the region who packed a suitcase for Berlin, London or San Francisco is proof that Varza's problem is not only French. The difference is that France has a billionaire ready to invest 50,000 square meters of space and a whole network of partners to keep its talent. The question for us stays uncomfortable - when a European hub complains it is losing people to America, where does it think ours go?

Whether F/ai will really create a European rival to the Valley, or be just another nicely packaged incubator whose best graduates still catch the first flight west - the second generation, starting in September, will show. For now, at least someone in Europe is asking the right question out loud.