Amsterdam’s ambition to be one of the world’s leading tech cities is slipping away. According to new research by tech data platform Dealroom, the Dutch capital now ranks only 28th in the world and seventh in Europe, down from a place in the European top three only a few years ago. The findings were first reported by Het Parool.
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Dealroom annually examines the 325 most important tech cities in the world, looking at the value of their tech companies, the level of tech investment, the size of the tech talent pool and the number of new start-ups. By those measures, Amsterdam has now been overtaken in Europe by Stockholm, Berlin, Cambridge and several other cities. “We see Amsterdam slipping,” Peter van Sabben of Dealroom told Het Parool. “What many tech entrepreneurs, investors, and last year also Peter Wennink, warned about is now coming true.”
A healthy tech system, Van Sabben said, is a “flywheel,” in which successful entrepreneurs and former employees reinvest in new companies. “In cities like London, Stockholm and Munich, that works well; in Amsterdam, it falters.” Several tech companies have already moved part or all of their operations away from the city, saying it has become easier to find talent and investment capital elsewhere.
A particular sore point is Amsterdam’s stance on data centres. The city has banned new data centres and is not allowing existing ones to expand, citing limited capacity on the electricity grid and the priority given to housing construction. Van Sabben argues this policy is “a brake on the entire tech sector.” Not only does it leave the city short of the data capacity needed to build artificial intelligence applications and “digital sovereignty,” he said, it also “sends a signal to tech companies that you do not take them seriously. Data centres are critical infrastructure for tech companies.”
He is not persuaded by the city’s reasoning. “They think very differently about that in the rest of Europe. There, they know that you only solve such problems by stimulating innovation.”
Even with the ban, large new data centre projects are still being built in and around the city, including a €1 billion, 78 MW Pure DC campus that broke ground in January 2026 to serve a single global hyperscaler. The disagreement is not over whether data centres can be built at all, but how welcoming the city is to them.
Another shift Van Sabben has highlighted is the sharp drop in the number of foreign tech companies setting up in Amsterdam. According to his analysis on LinkedIn, the city went from welcoming 161 foreign companies in 2019 to just 39 in 2025. Amsterdam itself changed course in 2022, moving from a strategy of attracting as many international firms as possible to “quality over quantity.” Without a clear definition of what “quality” means, he argues, that has effectively become a brake. Dealroom estimates Amsterdam is missing roughly 2,000 jobs per year as a result.
The picture is not entirely bleak. Dealroom’s wider data shows Amsterdam start-ups have raised more than $10 billion in venture capital since 2020, with annual VC investment consistently above $1 billion. The city is still home to more than 20 unicorns, including Booking.com, Adyen and Just Eat Takeaway, more than Munich or Milan. According to the State of Dutch Tech 2026, the Dutch tech sector as a whole counts over 11,000 companies and raised €2.64 billion in venture capital in 2025.
The question raised by Dealroom’s study is whether that base is enough to keep Amsterdam in the global top tier, or whether, without a change in approach, the city’s slide down the rankings will continue.
