Earlier this month, Central Bank of Ireland governor Gabriel Makhlouf issued a warning that the Trump-era tariffs could pose fresh challenges for Ireland’s economy and have consequences for foreign direct investment coming from the United States.
These concerns are valid and deserve serious attention.
But as the chief executive of Partsol, a US AI company that made the decision this year to relocate our global headquarters from the US to Ireland, I’d offer a different perspective rooted in our lived experience.
Partsol’s move to Ireland didn’t happen despite the global uncertainty or because of who sits in the White House. It happened because of Ireland’s stability, its deep alignment with European regulatory clarity and its position as a bridge between the best of American innovation and the rigour of European accountability and regulation.
Ireland offered the right mix of ambition and assurance – a rare and valuable combination in a world where both are in short supply.
Partsol is not your average AI company. Our technology – what we call Cognitive AI – is the next stage in AI’s evolving journey and is specifically engineered for high-stakes sectors where the cost of error is too high to tolerate. Specifically these are healthcare, law, accounting and financial services.
What makes our platform different is that it doesn’t “hallucinate”. It’s engineered with what we describe as AI Stem Cells, drawing from the four pillars of foundational science to ensure every output is based on verifiable truth. That means there are no fabrications, no guesswork.
You can’t build this kind of technology in a vacuum. It requires robust oversight, scientific transparency and, above all, a regulatory environment that doesn’t just permit innovation but actively, and ethically, guides it. That’s where Ireland, and by extension Europe, stands out.
Regulation is often cast as the enemy of innovation, a brake on progress or a drag on agility. I reject that view entirely. Frameworks such as the EU’s AI Act and GDPR don’t slow us down. On the contrary, they speed us up – not by removing friction, but by replacing uncertainty with clarity. These are not merely bureaucratic guardrails that are holding up the show, they are trust-building tools that enable long-term growth and adoption.
Partsol made its decision to move to Ireland during one of the more turbulent moments in recent transatlantic economic relations, not as an act of risk mitigation, but as a signal of our long-term strategy. We are a US company and are enormously proud of that fact, but where others might see volatility, we see vision. The EU’s principled approach to AI and digital governance, embodied by Ireland’s leadership on these issues, gave us the confidence to invest, grow and scale from here.
We’re already putting that commitment into practice. Partsol is in the process of hiring 25 highly-skilled team members in Ireland this year alone. We’ve already raised $28.6 million (€25.2 million) in funding and are on track to raise roughly double that again this year.
Our ambition is to build the world’s most reliable, most transparent, most scientifically-grounded artificial intelligence platform – and do it from Ireland.
Of course, Ireland’s appeal goes beyond policy. Its talent pool is exceptional, particularly in data science and engineering. The universities here are producing world-class graduates, and the local tech ecosystem is both intellectually rigorous and entrepreneurially dynamic.
There’s a unique cultural chemistry at work in Ireland, an openness to new ideas, matched by a healthy scepticism that insists on integrity and evidence. That suits us just fine and, no doubt, it will continue to suit other similarly minded US businesses irrespective of our own domestic politics.
None of this is to say that we should ignore the macroeconomic threats. The global economic terrain is shifting, and no country, Ireland included, is immune to its tremors. But what matters most in moments of change is not just resilience, but direction. Is a country simply weathering the storm, or is it steering toward something greater?
Ireland, in my view, is doing the latter. It has made deliberate, thoughtful choices about regulation, about talent and education, and about economic openness that make it positioned to continue to thrive even amid the present global uncertainty. The Trump tariff era, with all its disruption, has ironically highlighted just how valuable this kind of principled consistency can be.
For US companies looking abroad, the decision about where to grow isn’t just about tax rates or access to markets. It’s also about trust, stability and a shared purpose. It’s about finding a place where the rules align and make sense, where the people are brilliant and where the future is being built with both ambition and care.
That’s why Partsol is here and that’s why, despite the warnings, we are optimistic that Ireland’s role as a pro-innovation, pro-regulation gateway to Europe will not just endure, it will continue to thrive.
Darryl Williams is the CEO and founder of Partsol
