Why international deeptech talent is the Netherlands' next growth engine
September 2026, The Stack opens its doors in Amsterdam's Oostenburg district. The Stack is a 4,500 square meter hub built specifically to house Europe's fastest-growing AI startups, backed by more than €10 million in private capital, corporate partners including ABN AMRO, Google, Deloitte and Prosus, and the City of Amsterdam. It is expected to grow to 12,000 square meters and host over 200 founders by 2029¹. The reasoning behind it is blunt: the US has produced 40 AI foundation models, Europe just 3², and The Stack exists to close that gap by giving European AI builders a physical home instead of watching them leave for Silicon Valley.
AI is the most visible edge of that story, but it is not the whole story. The underlying strength it is built on is deep tech more broadly, the same base that produces quantum computers and chip technology, and that is where the numbers are strongest.
That single opening is a useful lens on a bigger point. A hub like this only works if it can pull in the best AI and deep tech talent in the world, not just the talent already living in the Netherlands. That is the real foundation being built here: an innovation base strong enough to draw the people who will define the next generation of AI companies, and put the Netherlands, and Europe with it, at the forefront of the global AI map rather than on the sidelines of it. That case rests on two things: a deep tech and AI ecosystem that keeps outperforming, and legislation built specifically to move fast.
A deep tech base that keeps outperforming
The Stack is the newest example of that pattern, not the first. The Netherlands ranks 7th globally in the WIPO Global Innovation Index 2025³, ahead of Germany and every southern European competitor. Within that position, deep tech is the clear structural advantage. Deep tech companies make up just 12% of the Dutch tech ecosystem, yet they produced 41% of all scaleups and attracted 41% of total venture capital in 2025, according to the State of Dutch Tech 2026 report from Techleap, TNO and Invest-NL⁴. Their scale-up ratio stands at roughly 39 %, more than double the 17% seen in the rest of the ecosystem.
The Netherlands also has Europe's highest density of AI professionals, at 10.9 per 10,000 inhabitants⁴. That talent base is backed by capital that is already committed rather than theoretical: corporate venture arms from ASML, Philips and KPN accounted for more than 44% of Dutch tech deals in 2025⁵.
Why deep tech needs a global bench, not a national one
International hiring matters more in deep tech than in almost any other sector for a simple reason: the specialist pools are worldwide, not national, and they are tiny. In quantum technology, McKinsey has found that globally there is only one qualified candidate for every three open roles. For highly specialized positions such as photonic engineers, the realistic global candidate pool can shrink to roughly a dozen people, according to Quandela, a Paris-based quantum startup⁶. QuiX Quantum, the University of Twente spin-out operating the world's largest commercially available photonic quantum computer⁷, is competing for exactly that pool, and so is every other photonics company in Europe, the US and Asia.
Semiconductors show the same pattern at greater scale. The industry needs more than a million additional skilled workers globally by 2030, with a shortfall of over 100,000 engineers in Europe alone, even as the EU Chips Act commits €43 billion to double Europe's share of global chip production by 2030⁸. For Dutch companies in ASML's supply chain, this is not a hypothetical future problem, it already shapes hiring plans today. No country, however strong its universities, can staff fields like this from its own population alone. The talent has to come from wherever it exists, which is precisely why international recruitment in deep tech is not a compliance topic. It is the only way these roles get filled at all.
The Dutch pipeline is already international, and that is the real asset
This is where the Netherlands already has a measurable edge that many employers underuse. The Netherlands retains 53.4% of the international graduates who study here, nearly double the EU average of 15 to 30%, according to the State of Dutch Tech 2026 report from Techleap, TNO and Invest-NL⁴. The Dutch tech ecosystem itself now employs roughly 135,000 people within the Netherlands and more than 213,000 worldwide⁹. In other words, the country is not trying to attract international talent from a standing start, it already keeps more of it than almost anywhere else in Europe.
That retention advantage matters because the gap it still needs to close is large. The same reporting points to an additional need of 300,000 technicians and IT specialists by 2030, based on the Wennink report⁹. Closing a gap that size cannot happen through domestic graduates alone, in a country of under 18 million people. It has to happen by turning the retention advantage the Netherlands already holds into active recruitment further upstream, not just holding on to whoever happens to enroll.
Legislation built to move fast
The Expat Scheme is the best-known piece of Dutch talent legislation, but it is not the only one, and the others matter more to how quickly a company can actually build a technical team.
• Recognised sponsor status, the gateway to the HSM permit, is typically decided within 90 days of the fee payment when RVO is not involved. Once granted, individual HSM applications are usually decided within 2 to 4 weeks, among the fastest skilled-migrant routes in Europe¹⁰.
• The WBSO scheme refunds up to 36% of R&D wage costs directly against Dutch payroll tax, a direct and immediate cash-flow benefit for hiring specialist engineers and researchers, before any product ships or turns a profit¹¹.
• The Innovation Box taxes qualifying innovation profit at an effective 9%, against a standard corporate rate approaching 26 %, rewarding the commercialization stage that follows R&D¹².
• For non-EU founders, the Dutch Startup Visa offers a one-year residence permit with no fixed minimum investment threshold, unusual among comparable routes, giving deep tech founders in particular a low-barrier entry into the EU market¹³.
Where the legislation still gets in the way
The same State of Dutch Tech 2026 report that shows deep tech outperforming also names the risk directly. Among its own recommendations to policymakers: update labor regulations to reflect the volatility scale-ups actually experience, and stop placing a disproportionate share of the downside risk on founders⁴. That is a measured way of naming a louder complaint coming from the market itself: Dutch regulatory complexity, and specifically the incoming Box 3 wealth tax regime, is doing real damage to the same founders and teams the country is trying to keep.
From 2028, the new Box 3 regime is set to tax shareholders on unrealized gains rather than realized ones. Under the proposal now in consultation, employees and early investors holding a minority stake below the “aanmerkelijk belang” threshold would face a 36% tax on paper gains whenever a startup's valuation rises at a new funding round, whether or not they have sold a single share or seen a euro in cash¹⁶. Founders and investors interviewed on the subject describe the practical effect: some early backers are already asking whether they should relocate, employees may be pushed to sell shares just to cover a tax bill, and companies can come under pressure to pay out cash instead of reinvesting it in growth, the opposite of what a scale-up needs at exactly the moment it needs capital most¹⁶.
The government has acknowledged the problem. Since April 2026, it has consulted on two fixes: a more favorable regime for employee stock options, taxed at sale rather than at exercise, with only 65% of the gain counted as income, and a narrower legal definition of 'startup and scale-up' that would exempt qualifying companies from the unrealized-gains rule from 2028 onward¹⁷. Neither is settled. The Dutch Association of Tax Advisers has already flagged the proposed definition as too rigid and its all-or-nothing structure as a source of legal uncertainty¹⁸, and sector representatives told a Tweede Kamer round table in June that a narrow exception is the wrong fix altogether: the underlying principle, taxing paper gains before there is cash to pay the bill, should not apply to anyone, not just to the companies that manage to qualify for an exemption¹⁹.
Cost adds a second layer of friction on top. Dutch employers carry an additional 25 to 35% above gross salary in social security contributions, holiday allowance accrual and pension costs²⁰ and Dutch gross salaries themselves sit toward the higher end of the countries the Netherlands competes with for the same talent. None of that is fatal on its own. Combined with a tax system still unsettled on how it treats equity, it adds real friction at exactly the moment a founder or a candidate is deciding where to build.
None of this cancels the genuine strengths covered above, fast sponsor decisions, WBSO and the Innovation Box are real and they work. But the signal from the market is clear enough to name directly: legislation built to move fast on immigration and R&D has not yet been matched by legislation that treats equity the way scale-ups actually experience it, as value that exists on paper long before it exists in a bank account. What extends the Netherlands' competitiveness over the next decade is not another narrow carve-out but the principle the sector itself is asking for: tax realized gains, not paper ones, as the default rather than the exception, and keep closing the gap between the speed of the immigration system and the speed of the tax system sitting right behind it.
The forefront opportunity, in the Netherlands and across Europe
The Stack is not just a building, it is a bet on where in Europe this thin global bench chooses to concentrate. Its own founders point to a specific problem: Europe trains excellent AI and deep tech talent and then watches much of it leave for Silicon Valley, only to buy back the resulting products at a premium later¹. The hub's answer is proximity: put founders, capital and operators from across the European AI ecosystem in one place in Amsterdam, physically connected to a broader network of hubs across the continent.
The Stack's own framing makes the deep tech link explicit rather than incidental. Techleap describes the hub as infrastructure for Europe's sovereign AI stack, spanning everything from equipment and chips through to the application layer, and deliberately positions it as one end of an Eindhoven-Amsterdam corridor rather than a standalone Amsterdam initiative, linking the country's semiconductor cluster around Eindhoven to its AI cluster around Amsterdam¹⁴. In practice that means infrastructure teams, model builders and application companies are meant to sit in the same rooms, on the logic that the people who understand what one layer of the stack needs are best placed to work right next to it.
That is the model worth paying attention to for deep tech more broadly. The Netherlands cannot out-produce China or the US on sheer STEM graduate volume, no single mid-sized country can. What it can do, and is already doing through its VC concentration, its R&D incentives and now its physical infrastructure, is become the place in Europe where the thin global pool of quantum, photonics and semiconductor specialists actually wants to land, regardless of their passport. Ecosystem density compounds, and The Stack has built that compounding mechanism into the building itself: a central event space runs founder sessions, investor days, hackathons and product demos, on the premise that daily, informal encounters between the right people are what turn into funding rounds, product launches and partnerships, not the other way around¹⁵.
For employers, this changes how international hiring for deep tech and AI roles should be framed internally. It is not an HR compliance line item to minimize. It is the mechanism by which these companies get access to a global bench that is too small and too specialized to ever be domestic. Positioning the Netherlands, and specifically Amsterdam's growing AI and deep tech cluster, as a destination candidates choose over the US or Far East, is now as much a talent strategy as a tax or immigration one.
Sourcelist
1. The Stack, official press release — thestack.ai/press-release
2. Techzine, The Stack: new Dutch AI hub opens in September — techzine.eu/news/analytics/142207/the-stack-new-dutch-ai-hub-opens-in-september
3. WIPO, Global Innovation Index 2025 — wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2025/article_0009.html
4. Techleap, TNO & Invest-NL, State of Dutch Tech 2026 report — techleap.nl/reports/state-of-dutch-tech-report-2026
5. Get Funded, AI and Deep Tech Investments in the Netherlands 2026 (corporate VC share) — getfunded.com/2026/05/12/ai-and-deep-tech-investments-in-the-netherlands-2026
6. Forbes / Firgun Ventures, Quantum's real bottleneck may be people instead of capital (McKinsey 3:1 ratio, Quandela photonics pool) — forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2026/08/06/quantums-real-bottleneck-may-be-people-instead-of-capital
7. The State of European Deep Tech in 2026 (QuiX Quantum, University of Twente) — deeptech.build/content/deep-tech-funding-policy-ecosystem
8. SEMI, The Semiconductor Talent Crisis (global and European engineer shortfall, EU Chips Act) — semi.org/en/blogs/the-semiconductor-talent-crisis-why-growing-demand-cant-find-leaders
9. Process Control NL, State of Dutch Tech 2026-rapport (135,000 / 213,000 employment, 300,000 shortfall, Wennink report) — processcontrol.nl/we-moeten-durven-opschalen-naar-wereldformaat
10. IND / Business.gov.nl, Recognised sponsorship and HSM processing times — ind.nl
11. Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) / ABGi, WBSO scheme rates 2025-2026 — abgi-uk.com/news-resources/innovation-funding-incentives-netherlands
12. Forvis Mazars, Dutch Innovation Box rate — forvismazars.com/nl/en/industries/technology-media-telecommunications/wbso-and-innovation-box
13. Dutch Startup Visa overview 2026 — unitcity.nl/blog/startup-visa-netherlands
14. The Stack, official website (sovereign AI stack framing, Eindhoven-Amsterdam corridor) — thestack.ai
15. Emerce, Amsterdam krijgt The Stack (central event space, full-stack chips-to-applications framing) — emerce.nl/nieuws/amsterdam-krijgt-the-stack-nieuwe-aihub-die-europa-minder-afhankelijk-maakt-buitenlandse-ai
16. EW Magazine, Nieuwe regels box 3: waarom start-ups en scale-ups bezorgd zijn — ewmagazine.nl/economie/achtergrond/2026/02/box-3-ondernemers-belasting-risico-startup-regels-1540644
17. PwC Netherlands, Consultatie wetsvoorstel fiscale stimulering startups — pwc.nl/nl/actueel-en-publicaties/belastingnieuws/loonbelasting-en-sociale-verzekeringen/consultatie-wetsvoorstel-fiscale-stimulering-startups.html
18. Accountancy Vanmorgen, NOB kritisch op uitvoerbaarheid startupregeling — accountancyvanmorgen.nl/2026/05/07/nob-kritisch-op-uitvoerbaarheid-startupregeling
19. TaxLive, Nieuw box 3-stelsel schaadt startups en scale-ups (Tweede Kamer rondetafel) — taxlive.nl/nl/documenten/opinie/parlementair/nieuw-box-3-stelsel-schaadt-startups-en-scale-ups
20. Talentup, Comparative Analysis of Salaries: The Netherlands vs Germany (employer cost add-on) — talentup.io/blog/comparative-analysis-of-salaries-the-netherlands-vs-germany