Arthur Mensch has a talent for pointing out the obvious while making it sound like a structural tragedy. The Mistral CEO, currently the poster child for Europe’s attempt to not get bulldozed by Silicon Valley, recently turned his gaze toward India. His diagnosis? The country is bleeding its best minds to the United States.

It’s not exactly a revelation. Anyone who has spent five minutes in a Palo Alto Philz Coffee knows the brightest exports from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) aren’t staying in Bengaluru to build local LLMs. They’re in California, tuning weights for Sam Altman or building the very infrastructure that will eventually automate their cousins’ back-office jobs.

India produces roughly 1.5 million engineers a year. Most are destined for the soul-crushing doldrums of IT outsourcing—the digital equivalent of a salt mine. But the top tier, the ones who actually understand the high-level math behind non-linear attention mechanisms, are looking at the math on their own bank statements. When OpenAI or Anthropic dangles a $600,000 total compensation package, "digital sovereignty" starts to sound like a very expensive hobby.

Mensch’s observation isn’t just about the brain drain; it’s about the gravity of capital. You can’t build world-class AI on vibes and patriotism. You need compute. Massive, heat-generating, debt-inducing stacks of Nvidia H100s. And right now, those stacks live in data centers owned by companies that have more cash on hand than some medium-sized nations.

The friction here is palpable. India wants to be a "tech superpower," but it’s currently functioning as a high-end finishing school for Menlo Park. The Indian government is trying to subsidize its way out of this, tossing around a $1.2 billion "AI Mission" to build local compute capacity. It sounds like a lot until you realize Microsoft spends that much on cafeteria sushi and office chairs in a fiscal quarter.

It’s a lopsided trade. India provides the raw intellectual ore, and the U.S. provides the refinery. By the time that talent reaches the mid-Atlantic, they aren’t "Indian engineers" anymore; they’re cogs in a machine designed to extract value from every corner of the planet, including the one they just left.

The irony of Mensch making this point shouldn't be lost on anyone. Mistral is, after all, the "French" underdog that survives largely because it secured a cozy partnership with Microsoft. It’s a move that felt a lot like a surrender disguised as a strategic alliance. Even the champions of European independence eventually have to bend the knee to the Redmond cloud.

So, what’s left for India? The "India Stack" and public digital goods are impressive, sure. They’ve mastered the art of digital payments and identity at a scale that makes Western banks look like they’re running on steam power. But AI is a different beast. It’s a game of brute force. If you don't have the chips, and you don't have the capital to keep your geniuses from fleeing to a zip code where a starter home costs $3 million, you’re just a spectator.

We’re seeing a new kind of colonialism, one where the borders are defined by server latency and the currency is PhDs. The U.S. isn’t just winning the AI race; it’s vacuuming up the starting blocks so no one else can even get in position.

Mensch is right to point at the wound, but he doesn't have the stitches. India's leadership talks a big game about "Atmanirbhar Bharat" (self-reliant India), but the reality is a one-way flight to SFO. The talent isn't leaving because they don't love their country. They're leaving because they want to work on the frontier, and right now, the frontier is behind a paywall they can't afford at home.

The cost of this migration isn't just a loss of tax revenue or a dip in local startup stats. It’s the loss of the "what if." What if the next breakthrough in efficient architecture happened in a lab in Chennai instead of a glass box in Mountain View? We won’t know. That researcher is already three years into a vesting schedule at Meta, working on a slightly better way to sell ads to teenagers.

Silicon Valley doesn't need to innovate anymore; it just needs to keep the vacuum turned on.

Is it a brain drain if the destination is a black hole?