Ilya went to university in israel and all founders are jewish. Many labs have offices outside of the US, like london, due to crazy immigration law in the us.
There are actually a ton of reasons to like London. The engineering talent is close to bay level for fintech/security systems engineers while being 60% of the price, it has 186% deductions with cash back instead of carry forward for R&D spending, it has the best AI researchers in the world and profit from patents is only taxed at 10% in the UK.
If we say that half of innovations came from Alphabet/Google, then most of them (transformers, LLMs, tensorflow) came from Google Research and not Deep Mind.
Many companies have offices outside because of talent pools, costs, and other regional advantages. Though I am sure some of it is due to immigration law, I don't believe that is generally the main factor. Plus the same could be said for most other countries.
Part of it may also be a way to mitigate potential regulatory risk. Israel thus far does not have an equivalent to something like SB1047 (the closest they've come is participation in the Council of Europe AI treaty negotiations), and SSI will be well-positioned to lobby against intrusive regulation domestically in Israel.
