The decision by OpenAI to plant its flag in King’s Cross with a permanent London headquarters, just days after walking away from a major data centre project in the northeast, tells you something important about where the real value lies in Britain’s artificial intelligence ambitions: it is in people, not power grids.
The ChatGPT developer has secured an 88,500 sq ft space in the Regent Quarter capable of housing 544 staff, a clear signal that it intends to more than double the roughly 200 employees it currently has working across research, engineering, policy, marketing and sales in the capital. Around 30 of those are researchers, and the company has committed to making London its largest research hub outside the United States.
The move comes at a politically awkward moment. Last week OpenAI shelved its Stargate data centre plans for Cobalt Park in North Tyneside, citing high energy costs and uncertainty around the future of UK copyright law. That project would have seen some 8,000 Nvidia chips deployed in a designated AI growth zone and was widely regarded as a cornerstone of Sir Keir Starmer’s ambitions to bolster Britain’s sovereign computing capacity.
Benedict Macon-Cooney, chief AI and innovation officer at the Tony Blair Institute, captured the tension neatly, noting that whilst Britain excels as a hub for talent, it continues to struggle to secure the large-scale AI infrastructure needed to compete globally.
But not everyone views the data centre retreat as the more telling indicator. Saul Klein, founder of venture capital firm Phoenix Court, argued that signing a commercial property lease is a far stronger commitment than headline-grabbing announcements about hyperscale compute. Leasing office space and filling it with people, he suggested, is not something a company can easily walk away from.
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