Bezos lab eyes King's Cross

Jeff Bezos’s Project Prometheus is in talks to lease office space in London’s King’s Cross, according to people familiar with the discussions. (aidirectory.com) The proposed lease covers three floors in the Jellicoe Building, totaling about 38,000 square feet. The talks were reported on April 26 and had not been publicly confirmed by Project Prometheus. (aidirectory.com) The move comes days after Project Prometheus closed a $10 billion funding round at a valuation of roughly $38 billion, according to Bloomberg. Jeff Bezos leads the lab with former Google X executive Vik Bajaj. (bloomberg.com) Project Prometheus is building artificial intelligence systems aimed at the physical world, including tools for engineering and manufacturing. Bloomberg said the lab is focused on models that help design and produce physical products. (bloomberg.com) King’s Cross has become a dense landing zone for United States artificial intelligence groups expanding in Britain. OpenAI said on April 13 that it had secured its first permanent London office there, with room for 544 workers. (cnbc.com) (uktech.news) Anthropic followed on April 16 with plans for a larger London base that can hold 800 people. CoStar reported the company leased about 158,000 square feet at 1 Triton Square in the Euston-King’s Cross area. (cnbc.com) (costar.com) That cluster is not new. FDI Intelligence said King’s Cross is also the birthplace of DeepMind, the London artificial intelligence company Google bought in 2014, and the area now hosts a growing concentration of research and commercial teams. (fdiintelligence.com) Project Prometheus has also been hiring from rival labs as it scales. Silicon Republic reported this month that Kyle Kosic, a co-founder of xAI who had later joined OpenAI, moved to Prometheus to work on infrastructure projects. (siliconrepublic.com) If the King’s Cross lease is signed, Bezos’s lab would join OpenAI and Anthropic in the same North London corridor within two weeks of their own expansion plans. London’s latest artificial intelligence office race is now being measured in floors, square feet and headcount. (aidirectory.com) (cnbc.com 1) (cnbc.com 2)