Knight Frank: Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies have leased 1M+ square feet of London office space since the start of 2025, or ~7% of available listings
Artificial intelligence-linked companies ranging from Anthropic PBC to OpenAI have been rushing into London for office space …
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier coverage documented Anthropic securing London capacity for 800 people while OpenAI began leasing its first permanent office, following OpenAI’s plan to make London its largest non-US research hub. Knight Frank’s aggregate shows these were not isolated leases: AI-linked tenants have become a material share of the city’s available office inventory.
Subsequent coverage of further London expansion—and Anthropic’s separate New York growth—places the leases in a broader push by frontier AI companies to build sizable operating hubs near talent pools, rather than maintain only small outposts.
First-order effects
- Anthropic, OpenAI, and peer AI companies gain physical capacity to support substantially larger London teams and local operations.
- London’s immediately available office supply is tightened by more than 1 million square feet of AI-company leasing, concentrating demand among a small set of fast-growing tenants.
Second-order effects
- Landlords and office brokers with suitable large blocks of space gain a new tenant category competing for scarce availability; other prospective occupiers face a narrower set of options.
- London’s AI talent ecosystem becomes more valuable to frontier labs as dedicated offices make sustained local hiring and team build-out easier, reinforcing the city’s role alongside US hubs.
Third-order effects
- If leasing continues at this pace, office footprint will become another visible marker of frontier-lab scale: firms with the capital to support major multi-city operations can deepen their advantage over smaller AI startups.
- The pattern points to AI expansion reshaping not only compute demand but also the geography of high-skilled work, with a limited number of global cities competing to host durable lab operations.
The trend: Frontier AI companies are converting rapid growth into permanent, multi-city operating footprints around concentrated technical-talent hubs.