Companies tend to fund applied research.
Funding in Europe, whether academic or industry motivated, is simply lacking across all scientific, engineering, and social science disciplines.
*Edit*. The question is why the united states has the "best research universities". That is a very general-level question and the Parent made a very general, and very wrong, claim in response. Regardless of whether some specific fields might have more industrial funding than others, it's easy to google the overall portion: and industry funding is quite minor.
https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2018-11/UniSource1....
GP never implied it was the largest contributor, and yes, depending on your field a significant amount of funding does come from the private sector.
Slow down there bud. Where did I say that?
Unless you’re talking about AI/ML, then yes, university labs receive more from companies, than government funding agencies.
If I miserepresented you, then I am sorry.
> Unless you’re talking about AI/ML, then yes, university labs receive more from companies, than government funding agencies.
This is simply untrue. Companies comprise less than 10% of overall university research funding, and AI/ML is far from dominant. It's easy to verify this.