OpenAI, Anthropic pile into London's King's Cross AI cluster

A decade after DeepMind quietly settled into King's Cross following its Google acquisition, the same postcode is now landlord to OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Wayve, Isomorphic Labs and Synthesia, per TechCrunch's tour of the neighborhood. Hoxton Ventures investor Hussein Kanji frames the arc bluntly: 'In the '80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,' and now 'it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom.'

The numbers behind that framing, sourced by TechCrunch to real estate firm Knight Frank and other trackers, are the interesting part. AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of London office space since the start of June. Prime King's Cross rents are up 18% over three years. Conventional office vacancy sits at just 0.9%. Around 3,600 AI startups in London have raised around $12.1 billion out of the $14.8 billion raised across the city. Knight Frank's Chris Dunn puts it in one line: 'Demand has outstripped supply.'

The wage picture is the part local founders should be nervous about. When Anthropic announced its London move earlier this year, TechCrunch notes it posted machine learning research engineer roles at £260,000 to £630,000. The London average for the same job is around £102,000. That is the recruiting spread a UK-headquartered startup now has to compete against in its own back garden.

Two views on what King's Cross actually is sit side by side in the piece. Wayve co-founder Alex Kendall says building a frontier AI company from London felt like 'an unusual choice' ten years ago and now feels 'obvious.' Phoenix Court's Robin Klein pushes back with a warning that Europe 'can't simply rent its AI capabilities,' and questions whether the UK will build the infrastructure, compute, energy and capital to make the cluster self-reliant rather than a landing pad for US labs.

TechCrunch keeps this as a real-estate and vibes piece: it does not break out how much of that $12.1B is actually going to UK-headquartered companies versus US-parented outposts, or how many of the leased square feet are billed to US parent balance sheets. For readers tracking where Anthropic keeps landing, the question worth returning to is whether the next Wayve gets built at King's Cross or just staffed from it.