Argentina Wants to Be an AI Hub
But what happens when it’s best engineers are already building the future somewhere else?
Walk through the corridors of Argentina’s top universities and you’ll hear a familiar story. The brightest AI graduates are packing their bags. Some head to Europe for funded research fellowships. Others go to the U.S. or Canada, where salaries can be ten times higher and labs are stocked with the kind of GPU clusters that Argentine institutions can only dream of. If you listen closely, the hum of ambition now sounds a lot like an airport terminal.
But president Javier Milei presents a different picture on television. He calls Argentina a future AI powerhouse. He sits with Silicon Valley executives. He even celebrates a $500 million investment pledge from Salesforce. And the country’s nuclear projects are now framed as “energy for AI.” The messaging suggests momentum. The pipeline beneath it is draining.
The Core Problem Isn’t Ambition. It’s Leakage
Argentina is not struggling to produce talent. It is struggling to keep it.
More than 52,000 public sector jobs have been eliminated since 2023, including over 4,000 scientific research positions (via Ibero-American Center for Research in Science and Technology). One leading AI lab in Córdoba, for example, runs its entire research cluster on roughly 20 A100-level GPUs (via Rest of World).
For context, Brazil’s equivalent national system runs on about 400 (via Brazilian HPC Council). Meanwhile, Italy’s Leonardo supercomputer operates with more than 13,000. More often than no, researchers don’t leave because they lack patriotism. They do so because basic experimentation becomes impossible at home.
This Isn’t Just Argentina’s Story. It’s an Emerging-Market Pattern
India faces the same dynamic. A long-term study of researcher mobility found that only 27% of Indian scientists who emigrate return (via ArXiv Mobility Study). Africa shows the same issue from the funding side. AI startups across the continent raised only $14 million in the second quarter of 2025—equal to 0.02% of $42 billion in global AI investment.
Many emerging economies now claim “AI hub” status. But most are building it on foreign attention, not domestic capability.
So What Actually Makes an AI Hub?
Not summits. Not branding. Not investment announcements. A real hub keeps three things within its borders—talent, compute, and direction. Argentina currently exports the first, rents the second and outsources the third.
The irony is that Argentina has the ingredients that money cannot buy. A strong mathematics culture. Engineers who already know how to build with constraint. Global recognition among recruiters who quietly scout Buenos Aires graduates.
What it does not yet have is gravity.
Until researchers believe they can build meaningful careers from within their own institutions, Argentina, like many of its peers, will continue to strengthen other people’s AI economies instead of its own.
And that is the real divide forming across emerging markets. Not who declares AI ambition first, but who can retain the builders long enough to realise it.
Oyinebiladou Omemu
