Big tech in Zurich

The precedent of IBM Research

The presence of international technology companies in Zurich has a long prehistory. In 1956 IBM established a research laboratory in the Zurich area, which moved to Rüschlikon on the shore of Lake Zurich in 1962. The laboratory produced two Nobel Prizes in physics in successive years. Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer were honoured in 1986 for the scanning tunnelling microscope, and J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller followed in 1987 for their discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials.¹ The Rüschlikon laboratory showed early that an American technology group could run world-class research from a small Swiss town with an international staff. It also established a pattern that later arrivals would repeat: close links with ETH, a mixed workforce of Swiss and foreign scientists, and research that was published openly while feeding the parent company’s products.

Google’s engineering centre

The decisive change came with Google. The company opened its Zurich office in 2004 and grew it into its largest engineering centre outside the United States. By January 2017 Google employed more than 2,000 people from 75 countries in Zurich and announced an expansion at Europaallee, next to the main railway station, with room for up to 5,000 employees. Teams in Zurich worked on Search, Maps, Calendar, YouTube, Gmail, the Google Assistant, Photos and Translate. Google also described Zurich as the European home base for its research on machine learning, in particular on natural speech recognition and synthesis.² The Europaallee campus was completed in June 2022, when Google employed about 5,000 people in Zurich from more than 80 countries, with a further office in the former Hürlimann brewery complex.³

Google’s Zurich researchers made contributions to the foundations of modern AI. The paper that introduced the Vision Transformer in October 2020, which showed that the transformer architecture could classify images as well as convolutional networks, was written by a team that included Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai and Neil Houlsby.⁴ All four of these names reappear below, because their later moves to OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic shaped the development of the Zurich AI scene. Google itself has stressed its close collaboration with the computer science faculty of ETH, whose alumni make up a considerable share of its staff, and it funds scholarships for students mentored by professors and industry experts.⁵

The growth was not linear. When Alphabet announced 12,000 job cuts worldwide in January 2023, more than 200 positions in Switzerland were affected. Up to 500 employees took part in a walkout at the Zurich office in March 2023, and the trade union Syndicom reported that more than 2,000 staff members had offered to reduce their working hours and pay to avoid redundancies.⁶ Later press reporting described further cuts and office space that Google had rented without occupying it.⁷ For the labour market these episodes had an ambiguous effect. They reminded Zurich that decisions taken in California can reduce local headcount overnight, although they also released experienced engineers who were quickly hired by start-ups and by the newly arriving AI laboratories.

Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Disney

Microsoft’s presence combines commercial activity with a research laboratory that is closely tied to ETH. In October 2019 the company opened its Mixed Reality and AI Zurich Lab under Marc Pollefeys, an ETH professor who works half-time for Microsoft. At the start the lab employed twelve Microsoft staff and hosted doctoral students from ETH and EPFL. By default ETH retains the intellectual property in the results, while Microsoft may negotiate licences for exclusive use. The two partners had by then worked together on individual projects for eleven years.⁸ On the commercial side, Microsoft operates data centres in the regions of Zurich and Geneva. In June 2025 it announced an investment of USD 400 million to expand them, pointing to the need of regulated sectors such as finance, health care and the public administration to keep data in Switzerland.⁹

Meta, formerly Facebook, built its Zurich office around computer vision and machine perception for virtual and augmented reality. Many of its engineers came from Zurich Eye, a joint programme of ETH and UZH that had researched self-navigating systems.¹⁰ In the early 2020s Meta announced plans to hire about 150 additional staff in Zurich to work on immersive virtual worlds. Microsoft, Google, Disney Research and Magic Leap were at that time also running laboratories in the city on mixed, virtual or augmented reality.¹¹

Apple has been more discreet. Its Zurich research activities grew out of the acquisition of two local companies, the virtual reality start-up FaceShift and the image recognition firm Fashwell. In April 2024 the Financial Times reported that Apple had recruited at least 36 AI specialists from Google since 2018 and was running a research team in Zurich, sometimes referred to as the “Vision Lab”, at two locations in the city. One of these was so inconspicuous that neighbours were unaware of it. The Zurich researchers worked on generative AI, including the MM1 models that process text and images together.¹²

Disney Research Studios in Zurich, directed by the ETH computer graphics professor Markus Gross, is the oldest of these industry-university hybrids. Its staff comes from about twenty nations, and more than half of its doctoral students are enrolled at ETH. Gross has said that relocating the laboratory would be difficult because it would take years to build a comparable relationship with another university.¹³ The laboratory was founded in 2008.¹⁴

Nvidia

The chip designer Nvidia, whose graphics processors power most of the world’s AI training, also maintains a research presence in Zurich. According to a report in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, about 200 Nvidia employees work at Europaallee on simulated virtual worlds in which robots can be trained before they are deployed in the physical world.¹⁵ The link between Nvidia and Swiss research is also visible in the hardware of Alps, whose Grace Hopper chips come from the same company. Robotics is a field in which the Zurich region has particular depth, owing to ETH spin-offs such as ANYbotics and the research groups at ETH and UZH described above.

OpenAI and Anthropic

The arrival of the two leading independent AI laboratories in 2024 and 2025 confirmed Zurich’s status as a European centre for frontier research. On 5 December 2024 OpenAI announced that it would open its fifth European office in Zurich. It hired three senior researchers from Google DeepMind’s Zurich site, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, to work on multimodal models. Mark Chen, then Senior Vice President of Research, described Zurich as a city “which has developed into a leading European technology center”.¹⁶ The episode that followed shows how mobile such talent has become. In late June 2025 the three researchers left OpenAI’s Zurich office for Meta, which was assembling a new superintelligence team and was reported to be offering exceptional compensation packages.¹⁷

Anthropic followed a similar path. In February 2025 it announced that Neil Houlsby, formerly a senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind and a co-author of the Vision Transformer paper, would lead its newly established Zurich office. After London in 2023 and Dublin in 2024, Zurich was Anthropic’s third European location and its eighth worldwide. The office was to focus on research, on the development of large language models and on multimodal capabilities. Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s Chief Science Officer, called Zurich “a natural home for Anthropic to grow its European presence”.¹⁸ Houlsby, who had lived in the region for more than ten years, pointed to the mix of global companies, strong start-ups and top research institutions. The cantonal promotion agency lists the reasons Anthropic gave for its choice as the local talent pool, the presence of ETH and UZH, the existing cluster of technology firms, quality of life and a considered regulatory approach.¹⁹

The decisions of OpenAI and Anthropic followed the researchers. Both companies came to Zurich because individual scientists who had worked at Google’s Zurich site were prepared to join them without leaving the city. For the financial centre the lesson is instructive, since it confirms that in knowledge industries firms follow the people. Zurich attracted these laboratories because it had become a place where the relevant scientists wanted to live, which in turn depended on ETH, on the earlier investments of Google and others, and on the city’s quality of life.

Cloud regions and data residency

The large providers have also built physical infrastructure in the Zurich region, which matters greatly to regulated institutions. Google opened its Google Cloud Platform region europe-west6 in Zurich in March 2019, with three availability zones.²⁰ Amazon Web Services launched its Europe (Zurich) region in November 2022, likewise with three availability zones, and announced a planned investment of about CHF 5.9 billion up to 2036. The customers named at the launch included Zurich Insurance Group, Swiss Re and Partners Group.²¹ With the Microsoft regions near Zurich and Geneva, three hyperscale providers now offer data storage in Switzerland. This eases, although it does not remove, the legal questions that banks and insurers must answer when they move client data or AI workloads to the cloud (section VIII below).

Notes

1. swissinfo.ch, “IBM laboratory glimpses the future”, 3 January 2006, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science/ibm-laboratory-glimpses-the-future/4918126. At the time the laboratory employed around 300 people from more than 20 nations. ↩
2. Google, “Zurich calling – Expanding our European tech hub”, The Keyword blog, 17 January 2017, https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/zurich-expanding-our-european-tech-hub/. ↩
3. Greater Zurich Area, “Google opens innovation center in Zurich”, June 2022, https://www.greaterzuricharea.com/en/news/google-opens-innovation-center-zurich. The article also mentions plans for an additional 15,000 square metres at Müllerstrasse. ↩
4. Alexey Dosovitskiy et al., “An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale”, arXiv:2010.11929, submitted 22 October 2020, https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929. ↩
5. Greater Zurich Area, “Google’s powerful AI research in Greater Zurich”, 29 February 2024, https://www.greaterzuricharea.com/en/news/googles-powerful-ai-research-greater-zurich. ↩
6. swissinfo.ch, “Swiss Google workers stage walkout as job cuts hit Europe”, 15 March 2023, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/swiss-google-workers-stage-walkout-as-job-cuts-hit-europe/48362046. ↩
7. The Swiss Insider, “Inside story: Zurich and the tech giants”, 21 April 2026, https://theswissinsider.substack.com/p/inside-story-zurich-and-the-tech, which reports about 175 further job eliminations in January 2024 and an unused office building at General-Guisan-Quai retained by Google. ↩
8. ETH Zurich, “New Microsoft research laboratory collaborates with ETH Zurich”, 3 October 2019, https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/10/microsoft-mixed-reality-and-ai-zurich-lab.html. The article notes that the model was inspired by ETH’s partnership with Disney. ↩
9. Microsoft Source EMEA, “Microsoft AI Tour Zurich: Setting direction in the AI era”, 29 April 2026, https://news.microsoft.com/source/emea/2026/04/microsoft-ai-tour-zurich-setting-direction-in-the-ai-era/. The article states that the investment serves more than 50,000 customers. ↩
10. Meta Careers, “The virtual future: Five questions with Zurich’s site lead”, December 2019, https://www.metacareers.com/blog/the-virtual-future-five-questions-with-zurichs-site-lead/. ↩
11. House of Switzerland, “Zurich becomes a global hub for the metaverse”, https://houseofswitzerland.org/swissstories/science-education/zurich-becomes-global-hub-metaverse (accessed September 2026). ↩
12. swissinfo.ch, “Apple targets Google staff to build artificial intelligence team”, 30 April 2024 (updated 28 June 2024), https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/archive-multinational-companies/apple-targets-google-staff-to-build-artificial-intelligence-team/76696549, reporting on the Financial Times. ↩
13. Greater Zurich Area, “Disney Research” (success story), https://www.greaterzuricharea.com/en/success-stories/disney-research (accessed September 2026). ↩
14. Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, “Disney Launches Global Research & Development Labs With Carnegie Mellon And Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich)”, 11 August 2008, https://ri.cmu.edu/?p=111098, announcing the Zurich laboratory at ETH under Professor Markus Gross; Digital Production, “SIGGRAPH: Disney startet globales Forschungs- und Entwicklungs-Lab”, 14 August 2008, https://digitalproduction.com/2008/08/14/siggraph-disney-startet-globales-forschungs-und-entwicklungs-lab/. ↩
15. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, “Die wertvollste Firma der Welt betreibt ein Labor in Zürich: 200 Nvidia-Mitarbeiter forschen an der Europaallee an virtuellen Welten”, https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/sie-tuefteln-am-gym-fuer-roboter-wieso-nvidia-in-zuerich-200-angestellte-hat-ld.1836160. Only the headline could be consulted, because the article is behind a paywall. ↩
16. Greater Zurich Area, “OpenAI sets up office in Zurich”, 5 December 2024, https://www.greaterzuricharea.com/en/news/openai-sets-office-zurich. ↩
17. PYMNTS, “Meta reportedly hires away 3 researchers from OpenAI”, 26 June 2025, https://www.pymnts.com/meta/2025/meta-reportedly-hires-away-3-researchers-from-openai/. ↩
18. Greater Zurich Area, “Anthropic appoints leading AI researcher Neil Houlsby to lead their Zurich office”, 13 February 2025, https://www.greaterzuricharea.com/en/news/anthropic-appoints-leading-ai-researcher-neil-houlsby-lead-their-zurich-office. ↩
19. Greater Zurich Area, “Anthropic” (success story), https://www.greaterzuricharea.com/en/success-stories/anthropic (accessed September 2026). ↩
20. Google Cloud blog, “New GCP region in Zurich: Growing our support for Swiss and European businesses”, 12 March 2019, https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/new-gcp-region-in-zurich-growing-our-support-for-swiss-and-european-businesses. ↩
21. Amazon, “AWS launches infrastructure region in Switzerland”, press release of 8 November 2022, https://press.aboutamazon.com/2022/11/aws-launches-infrastructure-region-in-switzerland. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.