- OpenAI signed the lease for an 88,500 square foot office in London’s King’s Cross on Monday, set to open in 2027.
- The new space at Regent Quarter has capacity for 544 team members — more than double OpenAI’s current 200-person London headcount.
- The announcement comes days after OpenAI paused its UK Stargate data center project over energy costs and regulation.
- “London is already a key hub for our research and teams,” said Phoebe Thacker, OpenAI’s London site lead, in a statement.
A 544-Seat Office in King’s Cross — and a Vote of Confidence in British AI Talent
OpenAI has signed the lease on its first permanent office in London, securing 88,500 square feet across Jahn Court and the Brassworks Building in the Regent Quarter of King’s Cross. The space, due to open in 2027, has capacity for 544 employees — more than double the roughly 200 people the ChatGPT maker currently employs in the UK capital across research, engineering, customer support, policy, and sales. The move formalizes a commitment OpenAI first signaled in February, when the company said it would make London its largest research hub outside the United States.
“The UK has an incredible depth of talent and a strong track record in AI,” Phoebe Thacker, London site lead at OpenAI, said in a statement reported by CNBC. “London is already a key hub for our research and teams, and this new office gives us the space to keep building here.” For a UK government desperate to position the country as a global AI hub, the lease is the rare piece of good news from Silicon Valley after a string of setbacks. Reuters reported that the King’s Cross space is intended to absorb fast-growing demand for OpenAI’s products in Britain and Europe.
The Stargate UK Pause Still Hangs Over the Announcement
The London office news lands less than a week after OpenAI paused its main UK data center project, part of the broader Stargate Project infrastructure buildout that drove its $110 billion funding round. The company cited unfavorable regulatory conditions and high energy costs in Britain — a pointed message to Westminster from the most valuable AI startup in the world. The Tyneside facility was supposed to be the centerpiece of the UK government’s AI growth strategy, and its cancellation dealt a real blow to the country’s compute ambitions just as Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and other rivals race to lock in their own UK footprints.
The contrast between the two decisions is the story. OpenAI is willing to bet on British AI talent — researchers, policy people, engineers — but not on British grid economics or the planning system that determines how fast a hyperscale data center can be built. DSIT now has to convince OpenAI and every other US lab that the UK can fix its energy and regulatory bottlenecks fast enough to host the next generation of frontier model training runs. Until then, London becomes a research outpost where humans build the algorithms — while the GPUs that run them keep moving somewhere else.
