Reading · AI Austria Newsletter

Matthias Grabner, Ting Wasner-Lian, Clemens Wasner, Ruben Hetfleisch · AI Austria Newsletter

It’s the season for closing tabs, yet the Austrian AI scene keeps opening new ones.

🎆 Recap 2025 and Happy 2026!

As we step into 2026, we’re taking a moment to celebrate a milestone year for AI Austria. Our community has expanded significantly, with our LinkedIn following surpassing 11k and our newsletter audience growing by 50% year-over-year.

Key highlights from the past 12 months include:

New Resources: We launched the AI Literacy Landscape, the country’s largest resource for AI education, led by Matthias and Patrick.
Industry Insights: Clemens spearheaded the 9th edition of the AI Landscape Austria, providing the definitive look at the state of AI in Austria.
Community Presence: Alongside partners like Austria Wirtschaftsservice, Ruben and team held 40 meetups and events across the country growing our Meet-Up 100% YoY.
Growing Leadership: We were thrilled to welcome Ruben and Catherine to our board.
New AI Austria Podcast: On 20th of January the first episode of the AI Austria Podcast will be launched - Follow on LinkedIn to not miss the first episode.
European AI Forum: AI Austria once again represents Austria on the european stage with fellow networks like KI Bundesverband (DE) and Hub France IA (FR).

Thank you for being part of this journey - we can’t wait to see what 2026 has in store for our ecosystem!

📍 AI Landscape Austria 2025 released

The latest AI Landscape Austria, co-authored by our own Clemens Wasner, shows an ecosystem in peak form despite a challenging global economy. This year’s report highlights a record-breaking expansion and a strategic shift in how startups are built:

Massive Growth: The landscape has grown by 25%, now featuring over 350 companies, fueled primarily by a surge in Generative AI startups.
The “Bootstrapping” Factor: In response to a tighter VC market, more Austrian founders are turning to “bootstrapping” - building profitable, self-sustaining businesses from day one rather than relying solely on external funding.
GenAI Reset: We are moving past the hype phase; the focus has shifted toward specialized, industrial applications where AI provides tangible ROI in sectors like manufacturing and climate tech.
Talent Hub: Austria is increasingly becoming a magnet for deep-tech talent, evidenced by local startups securing spots in top-tier global accelerators.

This year’s data proves that the Austrian AI scene is not just growing, but maturing into a resilient and highly efficient innovation hub.

» high-res graphic and analysis and 📺 deepdive discussion

💧 Liquid AI & AMD: A Powerhouse Partnership for Efficient AI

At CES, Liquid AI CEO Ramin Hasami unveiled a major partnership with AMD to optimize their “Liquid Foundation Models” for the latest Instinct accelerators and Ryzen processors. This collaboration marks a significant milestone, combining Liquid AI’s highly efficient, brain-inspired architecture with AMD’s hardware to challenge the dominance of existing open-source giants.

🚀 SF Tensor: Vienna-based AI Startup Joins Y Combinator

Vienna’s own SF Tensor has secured a spot in the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator to scale its innovative “Tensor Exchange” platform. By creating a marketplace for high-performance computing power, they are tackling the global GPU shortage and making AI infrastructure more accessible. We are thrilled to see Austrian deep-tech talent making waves on the international stage! » more info & video interview

In 2025, Generative AI moved decisively from hype to real-world impact, with multimodal models, video generation, and enterprise adoption dominating the year. Google emerged as the clear winner, as Gemini 3 led all-round leaderboards, supported by strong releases like Veo 3 and Nano Banana 2. Anthropic reinforced its position in B2B, especially in coding and developer-focused enterprise use cases. At the same time, Chinese open-source models such as DeepSeek and Qwen made positive headlines by pushing performance while strengthening the global open-source AI ecosystem.

The 2026 season of generative AI is ready to be focusing on real industrial impact, more sophisticated agent approaches, some real progress regarding robotics (Vision-Language-Action Models) and multimodal as well as world models.

Zhipu AI, widely seen as “China’s OpenAI,” has just released its IPO prospectus, signaling its push toward further growth.

Meta’s acquisition of Manus is primarily aimed at strengthening its general-purpose agent capabilities. Manus will continue to offer its products and subscription services to users through its app and website, and the company will remain operational in Singapore.

Alibaba has released Qwen-Image-Layered, a model that decomposes a single image into multiple RGBA layers, making the output inherently editable.

Jan 20 Foundations of Trustworthy AI

Jan 22 State of AI 2026 (SOA26)

Jan 22 AI4Industry - „Managing & Leading AI“-Edition

Jan 28 GenAI Community – Codeforce Edition (Virtual)

Jan 29 Trustworthy AI: Ethical Aspects

Jan 29 CIO Forward 2026

👉 For more information on upcoming events head over to our community calendar.

AI Event Calendar

Once a month we feature selected openings from our job board in this section.