The figure is striking: according to data published on July 2, 2026 by Crunchbase, global venture capital funding reached a record $510 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, surpassing the $440 billion invested across all of 2025. But the headline number hides the main story: artificial intelligence is soaking up the money, a handful of American players are sharing it, and the rest of the world, including Europe and France, is largely watching a redistribution from which it is mostly absent.
A record driven by just a few names
Looking more closely, the first quarter of 2026 was the largest quarter ever tracked by Crunchbase, with $305 billion invested. The second quarter, though down from that peak, was still the second-largest on record: $205 billion deployed across more than 5,000 startups. The momentum is real. So is the concentration.
For that second quarter, Crunchbase found that more than 70% of all startup capital went to companies focused on AI, compared with just under half a year earlier. In the space of twelve months, AI has gone from promising sector to magnet absorbing the majority of global funding.
Anthropic, or concentration pushed to the extreme
The concentration does not stop at the sector level; it narrows down to a single company. Crunchbase puts it bluntly: “nearly one-third of global venture funding in the second quarter went to a single company: Anthropic.” The lab announced on May 28, 2026 a $65 billion Series H, bringing its post-money valuation to $965 billion, just shy of the symbolic $1 trillion mark.
The headline number, however, obscures two important nuances. First, the $65 billion includes $15 billion in previously committed hyperscaler funding (including $5 billion from Amazon), meaning roughly $30 billion less in genuinely new capital. Second, Anthropic’s recovery of the title of “most highly valued private company,” according to the Crunchbase Unicorn Board, stems from a double shift: SpaceX dropped out of the ranking after going public, and Anthropic moved ahead of OpenAI on the board. The summit is therefore partly an optical effect: the Unicorn Board only ranks companies that remain private.
The scale is still vertiginous. Together, OpenAI and Anthropic captured $217 billion over the half-year, or 43% of all global startup funding. A small group of leading labs is reshaping the venture capital map on its own.
Two-thirds to the United States: the geography of capital
The third layer of concentration is geographic. In the second quarter, two-thirds of startup capital went to American companies. The share may look lower than before (it reached 83% in the first quarter), but that decline is mainly due to Anthropic’s mega-round, which mechanically inflated the U.S. share early in the year. Of the sixteen companies that raised more than $1 billion in the second quarter, eight were American, four Asian and four European.
One detail is more revealing than any percentage: in Crunchbase’s half-year report, France is not mentioned once. Neither Paris nor any French company appears in a global overview of $510 billion in venture funding.
Bubble or structural concentration?
Should we cry bubble? The question is legitimate when one company captures a third of a quarter’s capital and two players absorb nearly half over a half-year. But the bubble hypothesis, understood as a diffuse and irrational frenzy, fits the facts poorly: capital is becoming increasingly selective and pouring huge sums into a very small number of champions deemed capable of dominating the foundational layer. The pattern looks more like structural concentration, in which capital bets on the emergence of oligopolies rather than on ecosystem diversity. The risk is no less real; it simply shifts from a bursting bubble to dependence on a few suppliers, a topic already under regulatory scrutiny.
This dynamic fits into a broader trend. As early as 2024, generative AI investment reached new highs; in 2026, that logic is pushed to its most extreme arithmetic form.
What remains for Europe and France
This is the backdrop against which the European question takes on its full meaning. The funding gap is now measured in orders of magnitude. In AI in 2025, Europe captured only about 5% of global investment, or $5.9 billion, while the United States accounted for nearly 89% ($97 billion), according to the France Digitale-EY barometer. Anthropic’s single Series H is therefore worth more than ten times all of Europe’s annual AI venture capital combined.
France’s leading champion illustrates the gulf. Mistral AI’s latest confirmed round (a €1.7 billion Series C in September 2025, led by the Dutch company ASML) values it at €11.7 billion, or around $14 billion. That is nearly seventy times less than Anthropic’s valuation. The contrast is even starker when one recalls that just two years ago, Anthropic was targeting a $750 million fundraising round: the path from that ambition to a $965 billion valuation in thirty months shows just how far Europe has lagged behind this acceleration.
And yet France is not absent from the map. In 2025, it ranked first in Europe by the value of AI funding rounds, with $2.1 billion across 24 deals, ahead of the United Kingdom and Germany, according to the France Digitale-EY barometer. But this relative strength rests on a narrow base: without Mistral’s round, French venture capital would have fallen by 26% in 2025 instead of the 5% actually recorded. France depends on a single champion almost as much as the global market depends on Anthropic, a troubling mirror of the concentration it is itself experiencing.
A policy response, but out of sync with the market
Faced with this imbalance, Europe has opted for a public response. At the Paris AI Action Summit on February 11, 2025, the European Commission launched InvestAI, an initiative aimed at mobilizing €200 billion for AI, including a €20 billion public fund to finance four AI “gigafactories.” The goal is clear: rebuild sovereign computing capacity and reduce dependence on non-European suppliers.
The problem is timing. These gigafactories are not expected before 2027–2028, while private American capital is already deployed and already converted into product leadership. Europe is responding with forward planning to a concentration that is happening now. The continent’s cumulative investment shortfall, estimated by Atomico at roughly $375 billion over ten years, will not be closed by announcements alone.
Capital has never rushed so strongly toward AI, nor so little toward Europe. What the Old Continent still has are real niche positions (defense, voice synthesis, software tooling) and an active startup pipeline, in a game whose rules are now being set elsewhere. One figure captures the gap: the $35 billion still separating Anthropic from the symbolic $1 trillion valuation mark is nearly six times all the AI venture capital Europe raised in 2025.