OpenAI announced on Monday that it will open its first permanent office in London, with space for more than 500 employees, more than doubling its current staff of about 200 in the city. The company said it had officially signed a lease for an office space with an area of approximately 88,500 square feet on the same day. In February this year, OpenAI announced that it would make London its largest research center outside the United States.
Phoebe Thacker, head of OpenAI's London site, said in a statement that the UK has an "extremely deep talent pool and excellent track record" in the field of artificial intelligence. London is already an important hub for the company's research and teams, and this new office will provide space for OpenAI's continued local expansion. The new location is located in the King’s Cross area of London, where a number of artificial intelligence companies including Google DeepMind, Meta, Synthesia, and Wayve have gathered, and is regarded as an important gathering area for London’s AI industry.
The expansion comes after OpenAI just confirmed that it is suspending its major AI infrastructure project "Stargate" in the UK. OpenAI previously partnered with AI cloud infrastructure company Nscale to advance the project, but the company confirmed last week that it had suspended related plans due to factors such as energy costs and the UK regulatory environment. Discussions between OpenAI and partner Nscale are still ongoing, but the suspension is seen as a blow to the UK's AI infrastructure, people familiar with the matter said.
UK industrial energy prices are currently among the highest in the world and have been one of the key constraints in industry criticism of the country’s slow progress in AI infrastructure. Industry insiders previously pointed out to CNBC that high energy prices and delays in connecting to the national grid are the main obstacles facing the UK in developing large-scale data centers and computing infrastructure.
Despite this, the British government has continued to make efforts in recent years to position the country as one of the global artificial intelligence centers. Compared with the two major AI ecosystems of the United States and China, the UK still has a clear gap in technological innovation and financing scale. At the beginning of 2025, the UK launched the “AI Opportunities Action Plan” (AI Opportunities Action Plan). Since then, the financing received by local AI startups from venture capital institutions has continued to rise.
According to statistics from the data platform Dealroom, the total financing in the UK AI field has reached US$6.7 billion so far this year, close to the level of US$8.2 billion for the whole of 2025. Among them, AI cloud company Nscale completed US$2 billion in financing in March this year; autonomous driving startup Wayve received US$1.2 billion in funding in February this year; AI voice company ElevenLabs has raised a total of US$500 million in financing.
After OpenAI rival Anthropic had a dispute with the US Pentagon over cooperation issues, the UK has stepped up its efforts to "woo" OpenAI. According to a report by the Financial Times earlier this month, British officials have extended a number of olive branches to OpenAI, including supporting its further expansion of offices in London and promoting companies to adopt plans such as "dual listing" to attract OpenAI to increase its long-term layout in the UK.