‘Widow’s Bay’ Ends With One Last Surge of Delightful Dread
Widow’s Bay arrived on Apple TV with minimal fanfare and soon established itself as a show unique not just to the streamer, but across the television landscape. Katie Dippold‘s horror comedy fully delivers on both of those descriptors, being genuinely scary and genuinely hilarious.
It has unique characters, and that goes for its core cast as well as the supporting players—not to mention the weirdos who wander in to make a big impression in one or two scenes. Its setting is undeniably strange yet also cozy and familiar, a quaint New England town that has nearly every worst-case scenario and disaster you can imagine woven into its history.
The only thing we didn’t like about the season finale (which is fittingly titled “We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time!” and runs 48 minutes, a stretch longer than the usual episode length) is its arrival means we won’t be getting our weekly dose of Widow’s Bay anymore. However, we will begin counting down immediately to season two, which is thankfully officially on the way.
Last week’s episode, “Emergency Shelter,” ended with the big reveal that Ruth—the sweet but scatter-brained elderly woman who works as Tom’s assistant—is the last living descendant of Richard Warren. Wyck, Patricia, and Tom grappled with the unpleasant realization that once Ruth’s gone, the curse will end.
Wyck thought murder was justified given the circumstances; Patricia was horrified by the idea. But Tom made it clear he would handle it—and in the Widow’s Bay finale, we see him agonize about what to do as an apocalyptic storm rages across the island.
First, he checks Ruth’s medical records, hoping for something grim like cancer. No dice. There is a note about reminding her not to mix Oxycodone with Valium, which makes Tom pause for a moment.
Then, Tom drives through the thunder and rain to Ruth’s house. “You don’t have to do this,” Patricia pleads, her voice crackling over the radio. (In the background, Wyck chimes in: “Yes, you do!)
Tom’s response to Patricia is “Keep them in the shelter and keep an eye on my son.” We don’t know his plan—and neither does he—when he steps into Ruth’s house and finds her bopping along on her treadmill.
She’s surprised and delighted to see him. She assumes he’s driven over to escort her to the shelter. Thinking quickly, he points out that the roads are so flooded they should probably just stay put. She smiles and agrees, saying, “We’ve weathered storms together before, haven’t we?”
Back at the town hall, Patricia is rummaging through the emergency supplies stashed in the shelter. For an island so prone to disasters, they’re surprisingly ill-prepared. Rosemary, helpful as always, dryly recalls being warned never to go into this shelter by the “gal who had my job before me.” Ominous!
Wyck and Patricia agree that keeping everyone calm is their top priority. Just then, the lights flicker. Ominous!
In a private exam room, Dr. Morgan is humming Phantom of the Opera songs to himself as he checks over the very pregnant Chelle. “Probably a false alarm,” the doctor reassures her. To Bechir, however, he reveals the truth: “The baby’s coming tonight.” Bechir is horrified. If the baby’s born on the island, well—we know what that means.
At Ruth’s house, she’s blissfully unaware of any danger. Tom studies her calendar. It’s packed full of wholesome, do-gooder activities, including helping her neighbor up and down her porch steps every day. When she asks which flavor of tea he’d like, he inadvertently chooses the one that must steep for 27 minutes—unbearably long given the circumstances. The timer ticks, both literally and figuratively.
In the shelter, Patricia is handing out blankets when she finds an old note tucked into the folds: “If you can read this, I’m already dead.” OMINOUS! The people are quickly getting restless at the prospect of prolonged confinement, so she asks Dale to please find ways to distract everyone. Maybe there are some games tucked into one of the closets?
Bechir appears with an urgent question: where is Tom? Patricia pretends like she doesn’t know.
Elsewhere in the shelter, the teens are in search of mischief—including Evan, who swore up and down to Tom that he’d stay put. PJ has discovered a door that opens onto a shaft with a ladder built into it, very much like what we saw in Sarah Warren’s subterranean explorations in “Our History.”
Meanwhile, Dale is dutifully looking for ways to distract the masses. In a side room—which has a gun rack with a “check and clear all weapons” sign behind it—he finds a stack of film reels and an old projector.
The first reel is labeled “FOR THEM.” Dale loads it up. A cheerful host appears: “So, you’re an offering.”
Oh dear. Oh no.
“You’ve been carefully selected by a committee of your peers in a very fair, very rigorous selection process.”
The man continues. “Take comfort in the fact that there is an absolutely unassailable reason you’re here. Accept your fate and take pride: your sacrifice will save countless members of our community from needless suffering … Widow’s Bay thanks you.”
While Dale tries to process what he’s just watched, and frankly so do we, we cut back to Ruth’s house. She shows Tom her photo album, and we get some insight into what it’s been like for her, spending 84 years living in Widow’s Bay.
There’s an old boyfriend who “got bit by an animal and became that animal.” (No further clarification, but now we’re very curious.) She talks about working with a previous mayor, “Howard the Coward,” who left Widow’s Bay because “people get scared.” She remembers all the men who made passes at her over the years. We see Ruth’s parents, and she sighs, “Something got Daddy in the lake.”
When Tom points out she’s been through a lot, she tells him, “One of the benefits of growing up in Widow’s Bay is that we learn to weather the storms.” She agrees with Tom that it shouldn’t have to be that way, but “There’s no way around it.”
That offers an opening for Tom to approach the awkward reason he’s come to Ruth’s house, though he doesn’t come right out with it, asking, “What if there was something that you could do to change things?”
He brings up the trolley problem—the classic thought experiment, not the literal ill-fated trolley that Widow’s Bay tried to build back in 1942. It’s exactly the dilemma Tom is dealing with: would you knowingly cause the death of one person if it meant you’d save many more in return?
She doesn’t give the response he expects: “If I pull that lever, it’s a choice, and I’m choosing to kill that person, and I could never do that.” With some classic Ruth difficulty, she reads a favorite Tennessee Williams quote: “We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
Then the conversation turns. Ruth tells Tom she’s always been worried about him because he avoids the truth. He wants Widow’s Bay to be like Martha’s Vineyard, but that will never happen: “There’s no bliss waiting at the finish line. Even if there was, it would just be taken from you because that’s just life.” Tom has no choice but to accept that, she says.
Just then, he notices a familiar-looking brooch sitting on her coffee table. A family heirloom, Ruth says; we remember it from “Our History” when Sarah gave it to her stepdaughter, Frances Warren. Frances had it on when she washed ashore, and it’s visible in her portrait with Barnabus, as we saw in “Emergency Shelter.”
The tea is finally ready. Tom slips some crushed-up pills he’s pilfered from Ruth’s medicine cabinet into her mug. She takes a sip.
At the shelter, conditions are getting worse. The people, already tense, have discovered the limitations of their food and water supply. Chelle tells Bechir she thinks this will all make for a funny story they tell their kid one day. She chuckles but then grimaces; her contractions are getting more intense.
Patricia and Rosemary bring over some water for Chelle. Bechir again asks where Tom is, and Rosemary grumbles that he made her do a whole genealogy on Ruth. (Actually, it was Wyck that asked her to do that, but no matter.) This gives the sheriff pause, and he again asks Patricia what the hell is going on. We don’t see her answer, but whatever she says is enough to make him rush back to Chelle and tell her he needs to go take care of something… but he’ll be right back.
At Ruth’s, the photo albums are still out, but she’s gotten very groggy. Tom, assuming Ruth is near the end, tells her that when Lauren died, he didn’t know what he was going to do. Lauren had tried to tell him about the island, but “I laughed it off,” he says with deep regret. “I don’t understand why I didn’t just listen.”
The fateful ferry ride is when he knew for sure. And yet, he says, “I still brought tourists here. Because I wanted more for him. And myself. And now I’ve put all these people in danger.”
He looks over at Ruth. “I’m sorry, but I had to make it right.” She’s motionless. But is she dead? Does it seem like the storm has gotten noticeably quieter outside?
Nope! She was merely asleep. When she snaps back awake, the thunder sounds with just as much fury as before.
Back at the shelter, or rather, under the shelter, Evan, PJ, and Kelly enter the tunnels that so terrified Sarah Warren. They find the room with the chair that we’ve seen both in Sarah’s time and earlier this season in the present day. Kelly playfully sits in the chair, but there’s a sinister vibe in the air.
In the shelter proper, the crowd is in full freak-out mode. Why can’t they leave? Why is the door locked? Why are the lights flickering? Why is there suddenly an eerie monotone voice coming over an unseen loudspeaker, announcing, “It’s time. It’s time. Listen to your facilitator. Move forward. Do not beg”?
Quite reasonably, someone yells, “What the fuck?” Rosemary, thinking back to that old co-worker’s warning, mutters to herself, “That’s probably what she meant.”
Meanwhile, Dale is watching another of the film reels. This one is marked “FOR YOU.” The host urges the viewer to “be strong. Honor the pact. And remember, their sacrifice is our survival. The bad times will not end until the covenant is honored, and honored fully. Life for life. The island will make its needs known: one soul for each bell toll.”
The shot cuts from the host over to a row of people in their underwear tied to the wall, their faces covered. A man, whose style of horn-rimmed glasses suggests it’s the 1960s or maybe the 1970s, consults a clipboard.
The instruction continues: “You will be tempted to comfort them. Do not. Their fear is necessary. They say it likes the taste. Now, let’s pray for a long and peaceful slumber.”
Dale’s jaw is on the floor, as is ours. In the larger room, the lights go out; Patricia (and her flashlight) does her best to reassure everybody. It seems to be working until Dale emerges and shrieks, “This place is a death trap… RUN!”
At this moment, Tom tries to check in. He’s desperate to know if Evan is OK. But the radio returns only static and screaming. His next move is to grab a pillow and move toward Ruth, who’s now snoring, but he can’t go through with it. “You’re a good person,” he murmurs. “You don’t deserve this.”
Her eyes open and she launches into a story about having an affair with a married man. Tom thinks it’s just another one of Ruth’s colorful tales, but it’s so much more. “I got pregnant,” she confesses, as the amused smile drops off Tom’s face.
At the time, Ruth wasn’t prepared to be a single mom. So she gave the child to its father, and he and his wife raised the baby as their own.
“I watched my baby girl grow up from afar,” she says. It doesn’t take long to get to the reveal: Ruth’s child was Lauren. Tom’s wife. Evan’s mom. Evan is the true last living descendent of Richard Warren.
Ruth keeps talking. She’s still going to work with Tom every day because she wants to be a part of her grandson’s life. She’s relieved to finally come clean, but Tom starts freaking out about who else Ruth might have told. Just then, Bechir—another desperate father—bursts in and shoots her.
“She’s not the last descendent!” Tom screams. When he won’t say who the last descendent actually is, Bechir raises his gun again. Who is it?
“I don’t know,” Tom lies.
In the spooky room with the chair and the double doors, PJ and Kelly are still obnoxiously goofing around when Kenny the custodian suddenly appears and orders them to leave. PJ, a shithead, pulls the doors shut behind them, trapping Kenny inside.
Evan does his best to open them, but they’re locked tight. He hears Kenny cry out, “Something’s happening!” and scream in terror… and then suddenly fall silent.
At Ruth’s house, Bechir is fully prepared to blast an uncooperative Tom when the storm suddenly stops. Ruth, who’s wounded and bleeding, comes to.
In the shelter, the lights flicker back on, and the people cautiously emerge. “He must’ve done it,” Patricia says softly to Wyck.
When the lock disengages in the chair room, Evan, who’s still in the tunnel outside, peers in. It’s empty. Kenny is gone. The only way out would be through those sinister double doors.
Then, it’s the morning. The weather is calm and peaceful, but we can see there’s been significant storm damage across the island. Tom stands at the edge of the water with Sarah Warren’s brooch in his hand, which he flings into the sea, in a sort of Titanic gesture.
Evan watches him from the car, and they exchange small smiles. As Tom walks back, we hear the church bells tolling.
Eight times. “One soul for each bell toll.”
If you count up everyone who died in season one, it totals eight: Shep the sailor (the fog got him). Reverend Bryce (suicide). Richard Warren (crumbled into dust at sea). The paramedic (Boogeyman got him). The convenience store clerk (ditto). The Boogeyman himself (Patricia, bless her). Todd the shaman (tornado).
And, of course, poor Kenny, who met his end in the room utilized by previous generations to offer up their human sacrifices.
But if you go back to episode two, “Your Lodging,” you will recall the church bells rang nine times. Does that mean the only death this season that counts as a sacrifice is Kenny—and there are eight more left to go?
So, what happens next? More deaths? Or does the island take a “long and peaceful slumber” before waking up famished yet again? How much of the truth will Tom tell Evan, after all that’s happened? Will the Widow’s Bay tourism industry recover? Should it even try?
Guess we’ll have to wait until season two to find out! You can stream all of Widow’s Bay season one on Apple TV now.
Widow’s Bay arrived on Apple TV with minimal fanfare and soon established itself as a show unique not just to the streamer, but across the television landscape. Katie Dippold‘s horror comedy fully delivers on both of those descriptors, being genuinely scary and genuinely hilarious.
It has unique characters, and that goes for its core cast as well as the supporting players—not to mention the weirdos who wander in to make a big impression in one or two scenes. Its setting is undeniably strange yet also cozy and familiar, a quaint New England town that has nearly every worst-case scenario and disaster you can imagine woven into its history.
The only thing we didn’t like about the season finale (which is fittingly titled “We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time!” and runs 48 minutes, a stretch longer than the usual episode length) is its arrival means we won’t be getting our weekly dose of Widow’s Bay anymore. However, we will begin counting down immediately to season two, which is thankfully officially on the way.
Last week’s episode, “Emergency Shelter,” ended with the big reveal that Ruth—the sweet but scatter-brained elderly woman who works as Tom’s assistant—is the last living descendant of Richard Warren. Wyck, Patricia, and Tom grappled with the unpleasant realization that once Ruth’s gone, the curse will end.
Wyck thought murder was justified given the circumstances; Patricia was horrified by the idea. But Tom made it clear he would handle it—and in the Widow’s Bay finale, we see him agonize about what to do as an apocalyptic storm rages across the island.
First, he checks Ruth’s medical records, hoping for something grim like cancer. No dice. There is a note about reminding her not to mix Oxycodone with Valium, which makes Tom pause for a moment.
Then, Tom drives through the thunder and rain to Ruth’s house. “You don’t have to do this,” Patricia pleads, her voice crackling over the radio. (In the background, Wyck chimes in: “Yes, you do!)
Tom’s response to Patricia is “Keep them in the shelter and keep an eye on my son.” We don’t know his plan—and neither does he—when he steps into Ruth’s house and finds her bopping along on her treadmill.
She’s surprised and delighted to see him. She assumes he’s driven over to escort her to the shelter. Thinking quickly, he points out that the roads are so flooded they should probably just stay put. She smiles and agrees, saying, “We’ve weathered storms together before, haven’t we?”
Back at the town hall, Patricia is rummaging through the emergency supplies stashed in the shelter. For an island so prone to disasters, they’re surprisingly ill-prepared. Rosemary, helpful as always, dryly recalls being warned never to go into this shelter by the “gal who had my job before me.” Ominous!
Wyck and Patricia agree that keeping everyone calm is their top priority. Just then, the lights flicker. Ominous!
In a private exam room, Dr. Morgan is humming Phantom of the Opera songs to himself as he checks over the very pregnant Chelle. “Probably a false alarm,” the doctor reassures her. To Bechir, however, he reveals the truth: “The baby’s coming tonight.” Bechir is horrified. If the baby’s born on the island, well—we know what that means.
At Ruth’s house, she’s blissfully unaware of any danger. Tom studies her calendar. It’s packed full of wholesome, do-gooder activities, including helping her neighbor up and down her porch steps every day. When she asks which flavor of tea he’d like, he inadvertently chooses the one that must steep for 27 minutes—unbearably long given the circumstances. The timer ticks, both literally and figuratively.
In the shelter, Patricia is handing out blankets when she finds an old note tucked into the folds: “If you can read this, I’m already dead.” OMINOUS! The people are quickly getting restless at the prospect of prolonged confinement, so she asks Dale to please find ways to distract everyone. Maybe there are some games tucked into one of the closets?
Bechir appears with an urgent question: where is Tom? Patricia pretends like she doesn’t know.
Elsewhere in the shelter, the teens are in search of mischief—including Evan, who swore up and down to Tom that he’d stay put. PJ has discovered a door that opens onto a shaft with a ladder built into it, very much like what we saw in Sarah Warren’s subterranean explorations in “Our History.”
Meanwhile, Dale is dutifully looking for ways to distract the masses. In a side room—which has a gun rack with a “check and clear all weapons” sign behind it—he finds a stack of film reels and an old projector.
The first reel is labeled “FOR THEM.” Dale loads it up. A cheerful host appears: “So, you’re an offering.”
Oh dear. Oh no.
“You’ve been carefully selected by a committee of your peers in a very fair, very rigorous selection process.”
The man continues. “Take comfort in the fact that there is an absolutely unassailable reason you’re here. Accept your fate and take pride: your sacrifice will save countless members of our community from needless suffering … Widow’s Bay thanks you.”
While Dale tries to process what he’s just watched, and frankly so do we, we cut back to Ruth’s house. She shows Tom her photo album, and we get some insight into what it’s been like for her, spending 84 years living in Widow’s Bay.
There’s an old boyfriend who “got bit by an animal and became that animal.” (No further clarification, but now we’re very curious.) She talks about working with a previous mayor, “Howard the Coward,” who left Widow’s Bay because “people get scared.” She remembers all the men who made passes at her over the years. We see Ruth’s parents, and she sighs, “Something got Daddy in the lake.”
When Tom points out she’s been through a lot, she tells him, “One of the benefits of growing up in Widow’s Bay is that we learn to weather the storms.” She agrees with Tom that it shouldn’t have to be that way, but “There’s no way around it.”
That offers an opening for Tom to approach the awkward reason he’s come to Ruth’s house, though he doesn’t come right out with it, asking, “What if there was something that you could do to change things?”
He brings up the trolley problem—the classic thought experiment, not the literal ill-fated trolley that Widow’s Bay tried to build back in 1942. It’s exactly the dilemma Tom is dealing with: would you knowingly cause the death of one person if it meant you’d save many more in return?
She doesn’t give the response he expects: “If I pull that lever, it’s a choice, and I’m choosing to kill that person, and I could never do that.” With some classic Ruth difficulty, she reads a favorite Tennessee Williams quote: “We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
Then the conversation turns. Ruth tells Tom she’s always been worried about him because he avoids the truth. He wants Widow’s Bay to be like Martha’s Vineyard, but that will never happen: “There’s no bliss waiting at the finish line. Even if there was, it would just be taken from you because that’s just life.” Tom has no choice but to accept that, she says.
Just then, he notices a familiar-looking brooch sitting on her coffee table. A family heirloom, Ruth says; we remember it from “Our History” when Sarah gave it to her stepdaughter, Frances Warren. Frances had it on when she washed ashore, and it’s visible in her portrait with Barnabus, as we saw in “Emergency Shelter.”
The tea is finally ready. Tom slips some crushed-up pills he’s pilfered from Ruth’s medicine cabinet into her mug. She takes a sip.
At the shelter, conditions are getting worse. The people, already tense, have discovered the limitations of their food and water supply. Chelle tells Bechir she thinks this will all make for a funny story they tell their kid one day. She chuckles but then grimaces; her contractions are getting more intense.
Patricia and Rosemary bring over some water for Chelle. Bechir again asks where Tom is, and Rosemary grumbles that he made her do a whole genealogy on Ruth. (Actually, it was Wyck that asked her to do that, but no matter.) This gives the sheriff pause, and he again asks Patricia what the hell is going on. We don’t see her answer, but whatever she says is enough to make him rush back to Chelle and tell her he needs to go take care of something… but he’ll be right back.
At Ruth’s, the photo albums are still out, but she’s gotten very groggy. Tom, assuming Ruth is near the end, tells her that when Lauren died, he didn’t know what he was going to do. Lauren had tried to tell him about the island, but “I laughed it off,” he says with deep regret. “I don’t understand why I didn’t just listen.”
The fateful ferry ride is when he knew for sure. And yet, he says, “I still brought tourists here. Because I wanted more for him. And myself. And now I’ve put all these people in danger.”
He looks over at Ruth. “I’m sorry, but I had to make it right.” She’s motionless. But is she dead? Does it seem like the storm has gotten noticeably quieter outside?
Nope! She was merely asleep. When she snaps back awake, the thunder sounds with just as much fury as before.
Back at the shelter, or rather, under the shelter, Evan, PJ, and Kelly enter the tunnels that so terrified Sarah Warren. They find the room with the chair that we’ve seen both in Sarah’s time and earlier this season in the present day. Kelly playfully sits in the chair, but there’s a sinister vibe in the air.
In the shelter proper, the crowd is in full freak-out mode. Why can’t they leave? Why is the door locked? Why are the lights flickering? Why is there suddenly an eerie monotone voice coming over an unseen loudspeaker, announcing, “It’s time. It’s time. Listen to your facilitator. Move forward. Do not beg”?
Quite reasonably, someone yells, “What the fuck?” Rosemary, thinking back to that old co-worker’s warning, mutters to herself, “That’s probably what she meant.”
Meanwhile, Dale is watching another of the film reels. This one is marked “FOR YOU.” The host urges the viewer to “be strong. Honor the pact. And remember, their sacrifice is our survival. The bad times will not end until the covenant is honored, and honored fully. Life for life. The island will make its needs known: one soul for each bell toll.”
The shot cuts from the host over to a row of people in their underwear tied to the wall, their faces covered. A man, whose style of horn-rimmed glasses suggests it’s the 1960s or maybe the 1970s, consults a clipboard.
The instruction continues: “You will be tempted to comfort them. Do not. Their fear is necessary. They say it likes the taste. Now, let’s pray for a long and peaceful slumber.”
Dale’s jaw is on the floor, as is ours. In the larger room, the lights go out; Patricia (and her flashlight) does her best to reassure everybody. It seems to be working until Dale emerges and shrieks, “This place is a death trap… RUN!”
At this moment, Tom tries to check in. He’s desperate to know if Evan is OK. But the radio returns only static and screaming. His next move is to grab a pillow and move toward Ruth, who’s now snoring, but he can’t go through with it. “You’re a good person,” he murmurs. “You don’t deserve this.”
Her eyes open and she launches into a story about having an affair with a married man. Tom thinks it’s just another one of Ruth’s colorful tales, but it’s so much more. “I got pregnant,” she confesses, as the amused smile drops off Tom’s face.
At the time, Ruth wasn’t prepared to be a single mom. So she gave the child to its father, and he and his wife raised the baby as their own.
“I watched my baby girl grow up from afar,” she says. It doesn’t take long to get to the reveal: Ruth’s child was Lauren. Tom’s wife. Evan’s mom. Evan is the true last living descendent of Richard Warren.
Ruth keeps talking. She’s still going to work with Tom every day because she wants to be a part of her grandson’s life. She’s relieved to finally come clean, but Tom starts freaking out about who else Ruth might have told. Just then, Bechir—another desperate father—bursts in and shoots her.
“She’s not the last descendent!” Tom screams. When he won’t say who the last descendent actually is, Bechir raises his gun again. Who is it?
“I don’t know,” Tom lies.
In the spooky room with the chair and the double doors, PJ and Kelly are still obnoxiously goofing around when Kenny the custodian suddenly appears and orders them to leave. PJ, a shithead, pulls the doors shut behind them, trapping Kenny inside.
Evan does his best to open them, but they’re locked tight. He hears Kenny cry out, “Something’s happening!” and scream in terror… and then suddenly fall silent.
At Ruth’s house, Bechir is fully prepared to blast an uncooperative Tom when the storm suddenly stops. Ruth, who’s wounded and bleeding, comes to.
In the shelter, the lights flicker back on, and the people cautiously emerge. “He must’ve done it,” Patricia says softly to Wyck.
When the lock disengages in the chair room, Evan, who’s still in the tunnel outside, peers in. It’s empty. Kenny is gone. The only way out would be through those sinister double doors.
Then, it’s the morning. The weather is calm and peaceful, but we can see there’s been significant storm damage across the island. Tom stands at the edge of the water with Sarah Warren’s brooch in his hand, which he flings into the sea, in a sort of Titanic gesture.
Evan watches him from the car, and they exchange small smiles. As Tom walks back, we hear the church bells tolling.
Eight times. “One soul for each bell toll.”
If you count up everyone who died in season one, it totals eight: Shep the sailor (the fog got him). Reverend Bryce (suicide). Richard Warren (crumbled into dust at sea). The paramedic (Boogeyman got him). The convenience store clerk (ditto). The Boogeyman himself (Patricia, bless her). Todd the shaman (tornado).
And, of course, poor Kenny, who met his end in the room utilized by previous generations to offer up their human sacrifices.
But if you go back to episode two, “Your Lodging,” you will recall the church bells rang nine times. Does that mean the only death this season that counts as a sacrifice is Kenny—and there are eight more left to go?
So, what happens next? More deaths? Or does the island take a “long and peaceful slumber” before waking up famished yet again? How much of the truth will Tom tell Evan, after all that’s happened? Will the Widow’s Bay tourism industry recover? Should it even try?
Guess we’ll have to wait until season two to find out! You can stream all of Widow’s Bay season one on Apple TV now.
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#49ers #coach #Tesla #Autopilot #crashedElectric Cars,Entertainment,News,Sports,Tesla,Transportation">49ers coach says his Tesla was on Autopilot when he crashed
“I’ve had Autopilot for nine years, so I’m pretty comfortable with it and, you know, who knows what happened when I turned around? Whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off? That’s something I don’t know yet. But regardless, that’s… it is always your fault, whether you’re on Autopilot or not. You can’t take your eyes off the road. It’s a partnership driving, you don’t just turn it over to a computer.”
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.”
Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around $12.1 billion out of the $14.8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me.
That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a $3.3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said.
Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said.
Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.
U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.”
Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around $12.1 billion out of the $14.8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me.
That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a $3.3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said.
Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said.
Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.
U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK">This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.”
Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around $12.1 billion out of the $14.8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me.
That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a $3.3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said.
Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said.
Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.
U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Every step you take closes the doors that the attacker may open slightly, and when you combine everything, you would have a door to a series of locked gates.
Why Do I Need a Bastion Host?
When it comes to teams working with many servers, deploying a bastion host (jump box) may be a clean and effective way to solve the long-term problem. With this method, you only expose SSH to the bastion, and the other servers accept it only when it’s from the bastion’s internal IP. This centralizes logging and makes auditing access far simpler.
Using a virtual private network (VPN) and a bastion host together is perfectly fine – and many solutions use both: a safe way to access the private network via a VPN, followed by use of a bastion host to restrict which servers can be accessed. Some teams may decide to forgo the bastion because they don’t have the manpower to manage one, and so use a combination of a VPN and a set of firewall rules that still quite a bit lowers the exposure, but without the extra effort.
Mistakes Leading to Leaving Cloud Servers Open
The Mistakes That Cause Leaving Cloud Servers Open: Even the safest development teams may have slip-ups from time to time. One of the most frequent is leaving staged, or test servers with relaxed firewall rules equivalent to those of the production environment – hackers don’t concern themselves with which environment they first land on. Another frequent error is reusing the same SSH key on several servers and clients, causing one hacked laptop to compromise all servers that key has access to.
Another common human error is not removing or changing access when someone leaves the team, so stale credentials remain valid and accessible. At last, putting trust in the strategy of “security through obscurity” – meaning one thinks that setting up the unusual port or hiding the hostname from the public is actually sufficient security – creates a wrong impression of security. This is mostly true; in reality, modern-day attackers scan all ports anyway, and there is no way to hide from them.
System Administrators Guide to Secure Remote Access
Prohibit SSH password logins totally and depend exclusively on key-based authentication
Surely no one wants to type in the password every time; because of this, use only key-based authentication
Deter the user from logging in as root by default and instead use the sudo command to do root tasks
A firewall or security group rule can provide great help with IP address-based restrictions on SSH logins
For access that comes from untrusted sources or external networks, use a secure tunnel like a vpn or bastion host
Periodically change SSH keys and inspect access lists
Maintain records of login attempts and detect brute-force attacks as quickly as possible
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the principal means by which cloud servers suffer break-ins through remote access?
By far the biggest reason why this can happen is unauthorized password-based SSH logins that have been cracked by brute force. The scenario is most likely to develop where the administrator allows root login via password and leaves the default port open.
Sufficient security measures for the server via SSH keys: Do you think it is safe to rely only on key authentication?
It is true that SSH keys drastically decrease the danger of a successful brute-force attack. However, if there is only key authentication on the server, there are still risks – the server administrator can always enable root login or disable the IP-based login restrictions. So it is recommended to always have these three in the server configuration: disabled root login, restricted access to known IPs, and rotating the keys regularly as the main components of meaningful protection.
Is it really necessary to set up a separate VPN network while I am able to connect via SSH keys?
A VPN gives extra security by first encrypting your computer traffic before it reaches your network, where the SSH connection will be used. This is mostly important when working on untrusted networks – like public wi-fi – where there is a threat of a potential hacker in your local network looking at your data.
Bastion host vs VPN as methods of accessing the server?
The bastion host works by funneling SSH sessions from many users through a single, carefully monitored server point while the rest of the network (and mostly the servers) remains protected from the internet. At the same time, a vpn will fully encrypt the communication between the user and the corporate network or servers. The combination is very common among larger security teams as a part of the defense-in-depth principle.
How often should SSH keys be rotated?
The ideal period to change your SSH keys depends on the security practices of your organization, but generally a good practice is to change SSH keys between 90 and 180 days, or in the case that the user who had access with the key leaves or is no longer able to be contacted, such as when a team member leaves.
Why is only changing the port number for SSH enough to secure that port?
Changing the port reduces automated scanning noise in your logs but isn’t a real security control on its own — port scanners check all ports, so it should never replace key-based auth and firewall rules.
Every step you take closes the doors that the attacker may open slightly, and when you combine everything, you would have a door to a series of locked gates.
Why Do I Need a Bastion Host?
When it comes to teams working with many servers, deploying a bastion host (jump box) may be a clean and effective way to solve the long-term problem. With this method, you only expose SSH to the bastion, and the other servers accept it only when it’s from the bastion’s internal IP. This centralizes logging and makes auditing access far simpler.
Using a virtual private network (VPN) and a bastion host together is perfectly fine – and many solutions use both: a safe way to access the private network via a VPN, followed by use of a bastion host to restrict which servers can be accessed. Some teams may decide to forgo the bastion because they don’t have the manpower to manage one, and so use a combination of a VPN and a set of firewall rules that still quite a bit lowers the exposure, but without the extra effort.
Mistakes Leading to Leaving Cloud Servers Open
The Mistakes That Cause Leaving Cloud Servers Open: Even the safest development teams may have slip-ups from time to time. One of the most frequent is leaving staged, or test servers with relaxed firewall rules equivalent to those of the production environment – hackers don’t concern themselves with which environment they first land on. Another frequent error is reusing the same SSH key on several servers and clients, causing one hacked laptop to compromise all servers that key has access to.
Another common human error is not removing or changing access when someone leaves the team, so stale credentials remain valid and accessible. At last, putting trust in the strategy of “security through obscurity” – meaning one thinks that setting up the unusual port or hiding the hostname from the public is actually sufficient security – creates a wrong impression of security. This is mostly true; in reality, modern-day attackers scan all ports anyway, and there is no way to hide from them.
System Administrators Guide to Secure Remote Access
Prohibit SSH password logins totally and depend exclusively on key-based authentication
Surely no one wants to type in the password every time; because of this, use only key-based authentication
Deter the user from logging in as root by default and instead use the sudo command to do root tasks
A firewall or security group rule can provide great help with IP address-based restrictions on SSH logins
For access that comes from untrusted sources or external networks, use a secure tunnel like a vpn or bastion host
Periodically change SSH keys and inspect access lists
Maintain records of login attempts and detect brute-force attacks as quickly as possible
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the principal means by which cloud servers suffer break-ins through remote access?
By far the biggest reason why this can happen is unauthorized password-based SSH logins that have been cracked by brute force. The scenario is most likely to develop where the administrator allows root login via password and leaves the default port open.
Sufficient security measures for the server via SSH keys: Do you think it is safe to rely only on key authentication?
It is true that SSH keys drastically decrease the danger of a successful brute-force attack. However, if there is only key authentication on the server, there are still risks – the server administrator can always enable root login or disable the IP-based login restrictions. So it is recommended to always have these three in the server configuration: disabled root login, restricted access to known IPs, and rotating the keys regularly as the main components of meaningful protection.
Is it really necessary to set up a separate VPN network while I am able to connect via SSH keys?
A VPN gives extra security by first encrypting your computer traffic before it reaches your network, where the SSH connection will be used. This is mostly important when working on untrusted networks – like public wi-fi – where there is a threat of a potential hacker in your local network looking at your data.
Bastion host vs VPN as methods of accessing the server?
The bastion host works by funneling SSH sessions from many users through a single, carefully monitored server point while the rest of the network (and mostly the servers) remains protected from the internet. At the same time, a vpn will fully encrypt the communication between the user and the corporate network or servers. The combination is very common among larger security teams as a part of the defense-in-depth principle.
How often should SSH keys be rotated?
The ideal period to change your SSH keys depends on the security practices of your organization, but generally a good practice is to change SSH keys between 90 and 180 days, or in the case that the user who had access with the key leaves or is no longer able to be contacted, such as when a team member leaves.
Why is only changing the port number for SSH enough to secure that port?
Changing the port reduces automated scanning noise in your logs but isn’t a real security control on its own — port scanners check all ports, so it should never replace key-based auth and firewall rules.
#Secure #Remote #Access #Cloud #ServerCloud,remote access">How to Secure Remote Access to Your Cloud Server in 2026
Protection against unauthorized remote logins to your cloud server is a matter of SSH key-based authentication, a strict security policy on the firewall, two-factor authentication, and a secure communication channel – no individual component will give adequate protection by itself. The major risk point in breaches is not the server but the open door to remote login. To patch that vulnerability, you need a series of countermeasures, not a magical setting.
Why Remote Server Access Is a Common Attack Vector
Every cloud server exposes at least one remote access point – usually SSH on port 22 – and that port is scanned constantly by bots looking for weak credentials. Password-based login is the most common way a system can be attacked by brute force, and it is quite common with a standard setup that the system is left in a state where an admin/user of that system – “root user” – can log in directly by guessing the user ID and the password combination. Add in shared team credentials, forgotten firewall rules from old projects, and staging servers left publicly reachable, and it’s clear why misconfigured remote access – not zero-day exploits – is behind most cloud server compromises. The fix is simple, though you’ll need to do some setup yourself instead of trusting the default setting.
How to lock down SSH access in the right way
The best way to secure remote access is through a series of small improvements rather than one major overhaul. The following is a real working method:
Switch to SSH key authentication, then turn off password login completely in the same location: sshd_config. Keys are far harder to brute-force than passwords.
Disable root login over SSH and require a non-root user with sudo privileges instead; this is a security advantage that even without any change, one key compromising would limit the impact.
Change the default SSH port away from 22 to cut down on automated scanning noise (not a security measure on its own, but it reduces log clutter).
Restrict access by IP using your firewall or security group, allowing SSH only from known office or VPN IP ranges rather than the entire internet.
Add a VPN as a connection layer for anyone accessing servers from outside a trusted network – a VPN like Planet VPN’s free VPN service can encrypt the connection between a remote worker’s laptop and the server before SSH traffic ever leaves their device, which matters especially on public wi-fi or shared networks.
Every step you take closes the doors that the attacker may open slightly, and when you combine everything, you would have a door to a series of locked gates.
Why Do I Need a Bastion Host?
When it comes to teams working with many servers, deploying a bastion host (jump box) may be a clean and effective way to solve the long-term problem. With this method, you only expose SSH to the bastion, and the other servers accept it only when it’s from the bastion’s internal IP. This centralizes logging and makes auditing access far simpler.
Using a virtual private network (VPN) and a bastion host together is perfectly fine – and many solutions use both: a safe way to access the private network via a VPN, followed by use of a bastion host to restrict which servers can be accessed. Some teams may decide to forgo the bastion because they don’t have the manpower to manage one, and so use a combination of a VPN and a set of firewall rules that still quite a bit lowers the exposure, but without the extra effort.
Mistakes Leading to Leaving Cloud Servers Open
The Mistakes That Cause Leaving Cloud Servers Open: Even the safest development teams may have slip-ups from time to time. One of the most frequent is leaving staged, or test servers with relaxed firewall rules equivalent to those of the production environment – hackers don’t concern themselves with which environment they first land on. Another frequent error is reusing the same SSH key on several servers and clients, causing one hacked laptop to compromise all servers that key has access to.
Another common human error is not removing or changing access when someone leaves the team, so stale credentials remain valid and accessible. At last, putting trust in the strategy of “security through obscurity” – meaning one thinks that setting up the unusual port or hiding the hostname from the public is actually sufficient security – creates a wrong impression of security. This is mostly true; in reality, modern-day attackers scan all ports anyway, and there is no way to hide from them.
System Administrators Guide to Secure Remote Access
Prohibit SSH password logins totally and depend exclusively on key-based authentication
Surely no one wants to type in the password every time; because of this, use only key-based authentication
Deter the user from logging in as root by default and instead use the sudo command to do root tasks
A firewall or security group rule can provide great help with IP address-based restrictions on SSH logins
For access that comes from untrusted sources or external networks, use a secure tunnel like a vpn or bastion host
Periodically change SSH keys and inspect access lists
Maintain records of login attempts and detect brute-force attacks as quickly as possible
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the principal means by which cloud servers suffer break-ins through remote access?
By far the biggest reason why this can happen is unauthorized password-based SSH logins that have been cracked by brute force. The scenario is most likely to develop where the administrator allows root login via password and leaves the default port open.
Sufficient security measures for the server via SSH keys: Do you think it is safe to rely only on key authentication?
It is true that SSH keys drastically decrease the danger of a successful brute-force attack. However, if there is only key authentication on the server, there are still risks – the server administrator can always enable root login or disable the IP-based login restrictions. So it is recommended to always have these three in the server configuration: disabled root login, restricted access to known IPs, and rotating the keys regularly as the main components of meaningful protection.
Is it really necessary to set up a separate VPN network while I am able to connect via SSH keys?
A VPN gives extra security by first encrypting your computer traffic before it reaches your network, where the SSH connection will be used. This is mostly important when working on untrusted networks – like public wi-fi – where there is a threat of a potential hacker in your local network looking at your data.
Bastion host vs VPN as methods of accessing the server?
The bastion host works by funneling SSH sessions from many users through a single, carefully monitored server point while the rest of the network (and mostly the servers) remains protected from the internet. At the same time, a vpn will fully encrypt the communication between the user and the corporate network or servers. The combination is very common among larger security teams as a part of the defense-in-depth principle.
How often should SSH keys be rotated?
The ideal period to change your SSH keys depends on the security practices of your organization, but generally a good practice is to change SSH keys between 90 and 180 days, or in the case that the user who had access with the key leaves or is no longer able to be contacted, such as when a team member leaves.
Why is only changing the port number for SSH enough to secure that port?
Changing the port reduces automated scanning noise in your logs but isn’t a real security control on its own — port scanners check all ports, so it should never replace key-based auth and firewall rules.
![This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/DM9A2852.jpg?w=680 "This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK")
![This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/DM9A2852.jpg?w=680&ssl=1 "This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK")
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