Two weeks ago Stanford HAI released the 2026 AI Index report, 423 pages with lots of AI trend analysis. We already published one story on the report, but while reading through it, another map caught our attention. It mapped the geographic distribution of AI job postings across the United States, which prompted us to replicate the analysis for the EU.
We used the same underlying data source with categorised online job postings by the labour market data specialist Lightcast. AI skills range from specialised programming knowledge all the way to more general requirements like prompt engineering. For a more granular picture of AI-related jobs in the EU we highly recommend this report from our colleagues at CEPS.
Let’s start with the total numbers of AI job postings: Germany leads across the entire period from 2018 until 2025 and is currently followed by France and Poland. While Germany started very strong with 38k postings in 2018, it only doubled that number by 2025. Over the same period, France went from 9k to above 60k, and Poland delivered an even more impressive journey, from only around 550 to 56k AI job postings in 2025. Many countries also show a peak in total AI job postings in 2022, the year the public release of Chat GPT shook the market.
But total figures only tell part of the real story. While Germany has the largest share of AI job postings across Europe, it is outperformed by many other EU countries when looking at AI job postings relative to all job postings within a country. Here, countries like Portugal, Poland and Luxembourg take the lead reflecting different paces of adoption across the 27 EU member states.
Overall, and in comparison to the US, the EU presents a less centralised picture. In the US, a large share of the AI job postings is concentrated in California, Texas and New York while the distribution in the EU is more even at the top. That said, California alone had as many AI job postings in 2025 as Germany, France and Italy combined. And while the US has an overall share of 2,5 % AI job postings, many EU countries still linger around one percent. Critics might call AI skills in job postings a far-fetched proxy for real AI development, but it is a proxy … and some countries are clearly adapting faster than others.
Sources: Labour market data from Lightcast & Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2026 Fig. 4.4.10-13