AI powerhouses are betting on London’s future
London is a truly global city with a world-leading financial sector, a sophisticated and mature technology ecosystem, and the infrastructure to support growth at scale – and with these major recent AI office signings, we are seeing the city endorsed by the businesses shaping frontier technology, says Mike Wiseman
In my experience, the property market tends to know before the jobs numbers or growth figures do. Companies make long-term commitments to physical space – leases, capital investment, headcount – long before that confidence shows up in the official data. We’re seeing that right now in London, and it isn’t limited to one sector.
Take AI. At British Land, we’re tracking 2.5m sq ft of active requirements from AI and innovation-led companies, and we’re now seeing the full range of the sector in London – from global powerhouses such as OpenAI and Anthropic, both announcing significant leasing commitments here in recent months, to high-growth start-ups such as Humanoid. These are businesses taking space for people they haven’t hired yet, effectively betting on London before their recruitment plans, or revenue, has caught up.
We’ve seen this before. After the Brexit vote, the received wisdom was that financial services would drain out of London to Frankfurt, Paris or Dublin. The reality on the ground was more nuanced, and today London has caught up with, and in places overtaken, New York as the world’s leading financial centre. Landlords and occupiers kept committing capital and signing leases in the City long after commentators had written it off, and well before the sentiment surveys turned. We shouldn’t mistake short-term uncertainty for structural decline.
There are important lessons in that history for AI. Office demand today is a signal of where these businesses expect to be, not just where they are now – a bet that they can hire the right people, meet global customers, and work alongside universities and research institutions from a London base. It doesn’t need to be a homegrown success to be a good story: real estate saw confidence before the data after Brexit, and it is showing us the same thing again with AI.
I travel to the US regularly to meet the businesses driving this wave, many of them in San Francisco. What strikes me isn’t a specific playbook to copy – it’s an underlying assumption: that scale is simply achievable, and the only real question is how fast you get there. When a well-known US tech firm recently announced a significant round of job cuts, there wasn’t the reaction you might expect: those affected talked about starting businesses of their own, not crisis. That belief – that big outcomes are there for the taking – is worth studying more than any specific model.
By default, American businesses think bigger geographically and won’t hesitate to fly between cities for a meeting, whereas the UK tends to think in more local and regional terms, and this limits our ambition. The UK’s physical scale, though, is a real advantage: from major sources of global capital close to groundbreaking innovation, to the ability to get from London to Cambridge in around the time it would take to cross the Bay Area – proximity to the essential infrastructure of business is a genuine benefit on our shores. But our physical footprint shouldn’t force us to think small: our ambition has to be global too.
London is a truly global city with a world-leading financial sector, a sophisticated and mature technology ecosystem, and the infrastructure to support growth at scale – and with these major recent AI office signings, we are seeing the city endorsed by the businesses shaping frontier technology.
Stop talking London down
Coupled with abundant talent at the intersection of different disciplines in one city and a genuine culture of innovation, London should be talking itself up, not down. Its success does not need to come at the detriment of the rest of the UK – the reality is that major AI firms are choosing between London and New York, or London and Dubai, not other UK cities right now. Businesses bringing investment to London can have a hugely positive impact on the whole country, and when the capital does win, we should all embrace these victories.
It might not feel a naturally British approach to shout about our successes, but in an era of increasingly global competition we need to articulate how well London is set up to respond and cater to the clear trend in AI and technology growth that is well underway – and to recognise that trend for what it is: an early signal, not a lagging one.
There is certainly scope for the UK government to better support the AI sector, including looking at competitive tax incentives to make London even more attractive to the biggest AI and tech players. And to keep these players in London in the long-term, we must have the collective confidence to back ourselves and proactively shape the infrastructure required for London to remain a global AI capital.
London’s real estate market is the strongest it has been in the past 15 years, and the major businesses I deal with are investing in space and talent in the capital to catalyse their growth. That is confidence talking, well ahead of the data – and we should be listening to it, and backing ourselves accordingly. We should similarly be championing London and recognise that, admittedly with more to do, we are already a destination that other global cities rightly envy.
Mike Wiseman is head of campuses at British Land and a member of the firm’s executive committee