US AI giants are planting flags in London at a pace the city has never seen, and in doing so they are turning the British capital into the clearest rival to San Francisco, while making life harder for the homegrown startups they are landing next to.
In the past few months Anthropic has taken office space for 800 people in London’s Knowledge Quarter, roughly four times its current headcount there; OpenAI opened its first permanent UK office; the coding-tool maker Cursor said it will open a London headquarters this summer; Google is moving teams into a new 11-storey building in King’s Cross; and Databricks, Salesforce and the Nvidia-backed video startup Runway are all adding staff or space.
The numbers behind the rush are stark: AI firms signed for 565,000 sq ft of London office space in the first four months of 2026, with another 288,000 sq ft under offer, against 211,000 sq ft in the whole of 2025 and 130,000 in 2024.
Why London, and why now
The pull is talent and money. ‘It’s all about talent,’ Mike Wiseman, head of campuses at the developer British Land, told CNBC, calling London ‘one of the few markets globally’ that can support international scaling.
