What can Seattle learn about Amazon from Luxembourg?
At first glance, there aren’t many similarities between the Pacific Northwest tech hub and the small European nation, a financial powerhouse tucked between France and Germany. But we share a few things in common: a strong space sector, a taste for global innovation — and the outsized presence of Amazon in our local economies.
That last one made Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden’s visit to Seattle this week especially intriguing. Luxembourg is Amazon’s European headquarters, home to more than 4,250 employees, making the company the country’s second-largest private employer, and the four-largest overall.
Amazon’s workforce in Luxembourg spans Operations, Stores, Devices, and Amazon Web Services, including many of its European and international leaders. Illustrating its deep economic footprint in the country of 660,000 people, the tech giant says it invested more than €1.8 billion in Luxembourg in 2024 alone.
As part of a broader interview with GeekWire during his current West Coast tech tour, the prime minister explained how the country manages the relationship with the tech giant — describing Amazon as “a very good corporate citizen,” and explaining that he views the company as a “strategic partner.”
His comments stand in contrast to Amazon’s history in Seattle, where elected leaders have often wrestled with the impact of the company’s growth, and where the tech giant has at times threatened to slow hiring or relocate operations in response to proposed regulations.
“We consider Amazon almost to be a Luxembourg company,” Frieden said. “They use all the opportunities that we give to them, and that is my advice for other countries, as well. We are business friendly, we are open, we are stable, [and] we are predictable.”
That business-friendly approach isn’t new for Frieden. The 61-year-old prime minister, who was Luxembourg’s finance and justice minister before spending a decade in private legal practice, returned to lead the country in 2023 on a platform of maintaining Luxembourg’s competitiveness while strengthening its sovereignty.
Luxembourg is a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, and a founding member of the European Union. It’s known for a business-friendly tax environment that has attracted many international companies — making it one of the wealthiest and most connected nations in Europe.
Frieden’s trip was framed in Luxembourg media as a high-stakes working visit to “court leading AI firms” in Seattle and the Bay Area. As reported by RTL Today, the official purpose was to “strengthen economic, technological, and scientific partnerships” with a particular focus on artificial intelligence.
As part of his Pacific Northwest tour, Frieden visited companies including Microsoft, Boeing, and Amazon and met with a variety of Seattle tech, business, and venture capital leaders. His visit came as businesses in the Seattle area and Washington state grapple with a slate of new state and local taxes, raising long-term questions about the region’s economic competitiveness.
GeekWire spoken with Frieden at a corner table inside Redmond’s Woodblock restaurant, where his motorcade prompted some passersby to ask if U.S. immigration forces had descended. Nope, just the prime minister of one of the world’s friendliest nations.
Too much reliance on U.S. tech?
But we’re not the only ones curious about the Amazon relationship. Frieden was also questioned about it during an Oct. 7 appearance before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.
Alex Agius Saliba, a Member of the European Parliament from Malta, asked in his public comments how Frieden could reconcile Luxembourg’s goals for digital sovereignty — ensuring critical data and digital services remain under national or European control — with the fact that Amazon, a U.S. corporation, is such a big employer and a key part of its tech and economic infrastructure.
The prime minister didn’t get a chance to address the question during his European Parliament appearance, so we put it to him in our interview. He rejected the idea of a conflict.
“No,” Frieden said, “because I think digital sovereignty does not mean that you cut yourself off from the rest of the world. It’s only about having some control over your data, and that is a legitimate goal, I think, for any government, for any region.”
Frieden, whose U.S. trip also includes a visit to Silicon Valley, cited Luxembourg’s partnership with Google as an example of how digital sovereignty can be maintained in collaboration with U.S. tech giants.
That initiative, called Clarence, is a joint venture between Luxembourg’s LuxConnect and Belgium’s Proximus that provides a sovereign cloud solution for sensitive workloads while using Google Cloud technology. Luxembourg’s financial regulator recently adopted the platform to develop AI applications with full data sovereignty, and Google has also partnered with the University of Luxembourg on research initiatives.
AI regulation
Beyond cloud infrastructure, Frieden addressed one of the most pressing tech policy challenges facing both Europe and the United States: artificial intelligence regulation.
On that front, he expressed concern about the U.S. government’s fragmented approach. Europe has its AI Act, while the U.S. has an emerging patchwork of federal initiatives and state laws.
“It’s the wrong approach, because AI is by nature global,” Frieden said, arguing that Europe and the U.S. need to get on the same page. “That is why I believe that we have to work with the U.S. as Europeans to make sure that the rules are more or less aligned.”
While he considers the EU’s AI Act a more comprehensive attempt to regulate AI, Frieden is among the European leaders pushing for simplification. “Like in many areas of European regulation, it is a little bit too complicated,” he said. “That’s why I am among those heads of state and government who have asked the Commission to simplify the rules.”
The AI boom
With tech companies pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, we asked if Frieden is concerned about the risk of a global AI bubble and its potential economic or environmental consequences.
Frieden said he focuses on the positive aspects and welcomes the investments. While acknowledging that AI’s environmental impact needs to be managed, he drew a comparison to aviation — another industry he engaged with during his visit to Boeing.
Just as the aviation industry works to reduce emissions rather than halting flights, he argued, AI’s side effects can be addressed while allowing the technology to flourish.
He compared the current AI revolution to past breakthroughs.
“Every few decades there’s a major evolution in mankind, and that evolution always comes due to technology,” he said, citing electricity and the internet as precedents. AI, he said, “will have a huge impact on the way we live together, we work together.”
The challenge for political leaders is choosing whether to “support the fear of the people, or whether they encourage people to embrace technological change.” Frieden places himself firmly in the latter camp: “Every technological innovation has brought positive changes to mankind.”
Space exploration
The prime minister’s visit also highlighted another Seattle-Luxembourg connection: space. Luxembourg has been a global leader in the field for decades, building on its 40-year history as a satellite hub for companies like SES and Intelsat.
The country established the SpaceResources.lu initiative for space mining and recently announced “Project Oasis,” a partnership with Kent-based Blue Origin — the commercial space venture founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — to map lunar resources.
Frieden emphasized that Luxembourg’s space, science, and technology initiatives are interconnected, not competing priorities. “We developed three strategies: an AI strategy, a data strategy and a quantum strategy,” he said. “Space is part of some of those strategies as well.”
Luxembourg’s appeal
One sign that Luxembourg’s approach might be working? We’ve heard anecdotally that when U.S. tech workers — especially from Amazon — are assigned to Luxembourg from Seattle or the Bay Area, they often don’t want to return.
The prime minister attributed this to Luxembourg’s high quality of life, including its safety, its diverse population — half the country’s residents are foreign nationals — and its proximity to major European cities like Paris and Amsterdam.
“It’s a very peaceful country,” Frieden said, noting that this combination of factors makes Luxembourg particularly attractive to international tech workers.
