Ninja Quietly but Drastically Improved Its Slushie Machines
Other Slushie Machines I Liked
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
GreenPan
Frost Slushie Machine
The slushie machine from Belgian-founded wellness brand GreenPan is maybe the only slushie machine I’d describe as being even slightly attractive, or pleasant on a countertop—available in a trendy pistachio color scheme that a 21-year-old co-tester called “cute.” The slush produced by this device also had quite a nice consistency, perhaps due to a tighter auger around the cylinder that roiled the slush a little more. My colleague Martin Cizmar, who also tested this device, was able to recreate a Philly recipe for Italian-style water ice with Meyer lemons, and declared himself an unending fan.
The GreenPan slushed admirably, making a full chamber’s worth of spiked slush in about 25 minutes. This is nowhere near as fast as the XL or the Twist on slushing speeds, alas. The fill chamber is a little shallow, which means you have to pour slowly or you’ll make a mess. If you accidentally leave the handle down, you’ll also make a mess. Some reports online of cracks in the cylinder over use are also reason for pause. But if aesthetics are a prime consideration, this will slush handily. And look a little better while doing it.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
The original Ninja Slushi was quite simply a triumph of industrial design when it arrived in 2024—the machine that managed to bring the cocktail bar or convenience-store slushie to the home kitchen countertop. Among many imitators, Ninja’s original design remained the most user-friendly and reliable until the next-generation Ninjas supplanted it.
I’ve made coconut-lime daiquiris for a family of visiting Brazilians, who joked that they planned to take the machine back with them on the airplane. I’ve entertained a party full of children with the nonalcoholic version of slushie. And I’ve made silly frozen cocktails at home, whether lime Jarritos slushies or tamarind michelada slushies. Everything frozen is better, it turns out. Freezing a cocktail adds fun and removes shame.
But it’s been replaced. I consider the original Slushi a good value model, but it’s no longer the top of the market. The original Slushi doesn’t slush as well on higher-alcohol slushies as the newer XL and Twist, even for ABV below 16 percent. (Really, with an OG Ninja Slushi, the sweet spot is around 10 to 12 percent ABV if you want good consistency.) Milkshakes/soft-serve are not really feasible on the original Ninja either, always either foamy or ice-gritty.
Which is all to say, buy the Slushi when it’s on a good sale at $250 or less—or when it’s updated with a compressor as good as the one on the XL or Twist.
Other Slushie Machines Tested
Ever since Ninja took slushies to the home market, the Amazon directories have filled with newer brands you’ve likely never heard of and whose names sometimes seem subject to a randomizer engine: Inoviva, Chivalz, Vibofrost, Friwest, Aekda, Syintao, Vischic, Ranvaira, Rinvotio, and the list goes on. Most are available at discounts compared to Ninja or other more recognizable brands.
I’ve tested three such brands: Chivalz, Invoviva, and Vibofrost. All three have had one form of reliability issue or another: basic design defects, inconsistency of performance, or simply disappearing from the market.
Chivalz Slushie Machine (no longer in stock): This was previously WIRED’s budget pick, which my co-tester Kat Merck called, without insult, “a quite respectable Ninja Slushi knockoff.” The device arrived with a welcome digital temp readout and a removable back panel that made cleaning easier on the slush chamber. Performance was comparable to the original Ninja, though the user interface was a bit janky. But since last year, the brand’s slushie machines seem to have disappeared, as the brand’s focus moved to air purifiers and humidifiers.
Vibofrost Slushie Machine ($235, sold out after Prime Day): This Vibofrost, like the Chivalz, freezes slushies comparably to the original Ninja Slushi. And like the Chivalz, it has a somewhat irritating child-lock feature, and a timed feature that seems of limited utility. Though it will slush within around 20 to 30 minutes, the oddly designed spout can spray wildly if there’s any liquid in the machine, the drip tray does not attach securely, and it kinda moans like a dying tauntaun while in operation.
Inoviva Slushie Machine for $120: I tested this Inoviva slushie machine twice. The first time, the device registered much louder than competitors, the drip tray arrived stuck to the machine, and the compressor began to fail after a week’s testing. The second time, it was still loud, and the user interface had a difficult-to-navigate locking feature, but freezing was indeed more consistent. The inconsistency in quality control makes this device difficult to recommend. But maybe you’re willing to brave this for a steeply discounted price. The Inoviva also has one terrific feature: The ability to adjust thickness for each drink setting.
My co-tester Kat Merck (on the now-discontinued Chivalz) and I made so very many slushies with each machine, from dairy to nondairy to coffee slushies to straight-up bottles of wine. Specifically, we tested every version of slush that a machine advertised. If Ninja or GreenPan says a machine can make frappés and milkshakes and frozen juices, we made frappés and milkshakes and frozen juices, tinkering where necessary. I froze orange juice and strawberry juice, slushed a bouquet’s worth of rosé, and made slushies from daiquiri to margarita to whiskey Coke. I slushed tamarind micheladas (an excellent idea) and Twisted Tea (a terrible idea).
Photograph: Kat Merck
I also raced the freezing capabilities of all three machines by pouring a 16-ounce can of delicious Mango Mike’s Harder Lemonade in each, then seeing which machine was fastest. (For the XL, I used a 24-ounce can.) And I made smooth and dense coconut-lime daiquiris with coconut milk, according to Ninja’s recipe, to test how well each machine’s dispenser handled a genuine dense-textured challenge.
How Do Home Slushie Machines Work?
The tech is pretty simple, almost ingeniously so: A beefy cylindrical freezing core in the center of the drink chamber continually cools any liquid in contact with it. It’s encircled by a plastic spiral auger attached to a motor. The auger mixes the drink, keeps it slushing instead of freezing solid, and also pushes the resulting slush toward the dispenser nozzle so you can have some. The resolute simplicity of this design allowed Ninja and others to scale down the commercial slushie maker for home consumers thirsty for frozen treats.
The main requirement is that the frozen beverage have more than 4 percent sugar—or between 3 percent and 16 percent alcohol—in order to lower the freezing point of the resulting concoction and make slushing possible. Some slushie machine vendors recommend percentages more like 15 percent sugar, for perfect consistency. But I often balk at this. Coca-Cola and orange juice are each around 11 percent sugar—so that’s very sweet. Some hero of the internet has made a slush calculator for easy reference.
A minimum of 16 ounces of liquid is required for most 88-ounce home machines, for simple reasons: The liquid needs to be in physical contact with the core in order to slush up and also to keep ice from forming on the central cylinder’s surface. The Slushi XL requires a 24-ounce minimum, because it’s bigger.
Can You Put Diet Soda in a Slushie Machine?
No and yes. Slushies rely on a helpful property of water: Sugar (or salt) dissolved in water lowers its freezing point below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Why? Solubles like sugar are chaos agents. Sugar molecules move randomly, refuse to dissolve into ice, and interfere with water’s ability to form hydrogen bonds and turn crystalline. Some water molecules freeze, but sugar water doesn’t. Tada! Slush.
If you try to make a slushie out of sugar-free soda, or sugar-free anything, ice crystals will instead form easily. The stainless steel freezing core will ice over and scrape on the auger, and ice cubes or hunks will gather mass in the slushie machine. The cylinder will start to shake, then the machine will clunk, then eventually you’ll probably break your machine: Low-sugar fail-safes on these devices have not been overly reliable, alas. So don’t try this at home!
This doesn’t mean you’re doomed to massive calories if you want to make a slushie. Not every artificial sweetener lowers the freezing point appropriately, but the one that Ninja recommends for diet slushies is allulose, a rare but naturally occurring sugar that’s 70 percent as sweet as basic sugar but is not metabolized effectively by the human digestive system. This means it’s low in calories and doesn’t cause insulin spikes—but as with a lot of indigestibles, note that side effects can include bloating or GI distress for some.
For easiest use in a slushie, buy liquid allulose. Powdered versions also exist, but to use them, you’ll need to make a simple syrup by heating up the powder in water to help it dissolve, then let it cool. If you just try to drop the allulose powder into your machine with some Diet Coke, it might not dissolve, and you might still get ice formation. Or at least, I definitely still got ice formation when I tried this on the OG Ninja, and had to stop my machine.
How Can You Stop Milkshakes From Getting Foamy in a Slushie Machine?
Bet you didn’t expect a lesson in milk proteins today! But here’s the deal: Milk proteins start to separate when agitated. Churning milk is, in fact, how butter gets made. Proteins separate out, and you get butter on the one side and buttermilk on the other. Both are delicious, but neither is wanted in a milkshake.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
If you try to make a milkshake in a churning slushie machine using just milk, you’ll eventually start to see the effects of these milk proteins separating out from buttermilk—which will manifest first as an undesirable foaminess. To avoid this, Ninja recommends also adding heavy cream or half-and-half to any milkshake recipe. The higher fat content will keep things smoother.
Note it’s easiest to use fruit syrups, rather than just juice, and add vanillin, or it’ll be a bit boring: The heavy fat tends to overwhelm any subtle fruit flavors. Another deep secret of the tasty milkshake? Salt. Add a tiiiinny pinch; it’ll help bring out flavor. A 16-ounce McDonald’s milkshake has 260 milligrams of sodium—about 1/16th of a teaspoon of table salt, or approximately the amount that fits between your index finger and your thumb.
But temper your expectations here. None of the slushie machines we tested made a texture comparable to a classic milkshake. On most machines, which don’t have compressors as powerful as the new-model Ninjas that are now our top picks, the texture is often a little ice-gritty and not as richly textured or integrated as the milkshake you’ll get from your local burger joint, let alone the soft serve from the famously broken ice cream machines at McDonald’s. Slushie machines also can’t handle chunks of frozen fruit, often the best part of a milkshake.
On the newer Ninjas, with their more powerful freezing power, I was able to get the smoothness and freeze I wanted. But because most recipes call for a high-fat mix of 2:1 milk and heavy cream in order ot avoid churning foam and butter, the results still weren’t quite a light milkshake. It was more like a dense, rich, quite tasty soft serve.
Now, do I like being able to make 20-minute soft-serve in my home? From milk and heavy cream and sugar and a dash of vanilla? Heck yes, I do.
#Ninja #Quietly #Drastically #Improved #Slushie #Machineskitchen,shopping,household,food and drink,amazon
The slushie machine from Belgian-founded wellness brand GreenPan is maybe the only slushie machine I’d describe as being even slightly attractive, or pleasant on a countertop—available in a trendy pistachio color scheme that a 21-year-old co-tester called “cute.” The slush produced by this device also had quite a nice consistency, perhaps due to a tighter auger around the cylinder that roiled the slush a little more. My colleague Martin Cizmar, who also tested this device, was able to recreate a Philly recipe for Italian-style water ice with Meyer lemons, and declared himself an unending fan.
The GreenPan slushed admirably, making a full chamber’s worth of spiked slush in about 25 minutes. This is nowhere near as fast as the XL or the Twist on slushing speeds, alas. The fill chamber is a little shallow, which means you have to pour slowly or you’ll make a mess. If you accidentally leave the handle down, you’ll also make a mess. Some reports online of cracks in the cylinder over use are also reason for pause. But if aesthetics are a prime consideration, this will slush handily. And look a little better while doing it.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
The original Ninja Slushi was quite simply a triumph of industrial design when it arrived in 2024—the machine that managed to bring the cocktail bar or convenience-store slushie to the home kitchen countertop. Among many imitators, Ninja’s original design remained the most user-friendly and reliable until the next-generation Ninjas supplanted it.
I’ve made coconut-lime daiquiris for a family of visiting Brazilians, who joked that they planned to take the machine back with them on the airplane. I’ve entertained a party full of children with the nonalcoholic version of slushie. And I’ve made silly frozen cocktails at home, whether lime Jarritos slushies or tamarind michelada slushies. Everything frozen is better, it turns out. Freezing a cocktail adds fun and removes shame.
But it’s been replaced. I consider the original Slushi a good value model, but it’s no longer the top of the market. The original Slushi doesn’t slush as well on higher-alcohol slushies as the newer XL and Twist, even for ABV below 16 percent. (Really, with an OG Ninja Slushi, the sweet spot is around 10 to 12 percent ABV if you want good consistency.) Milkshakes/soft-serve are not really feasible on the original Ninja either, always either foamy or ice-gritty.
Which is all to say, buy the Slushi when it’s on a good sale at $250 or less—or when it’s updated with a compressor as good as the one on the XL or Twist.
Other Slushie Machines Tested
Ever since Ninja took slushies to the home market, the Amazon directories have filled with newer brands you’ve likely never heard of and whose names sometimes seem subject to a randomizer engine: Inoviva, Chivalz, Vibofrost, Friwest, Aekda, Syintao, Vischic, Ranvaira, Rinvotio, and the list goes on. Most are available at discounts compared to Ninja or other more recognizable brands.
I’ve tested three such brands: Chivalz, Invoviva, and Vibofrost. All three have had one form of reliability issue or another: basic design defects, inconsistency of performance, or simply disappearing from the market.
Chivalz Slushie Machine (no longer in stock): This was previously WIRED’s budget pick, which my co-tester Kat Merck called, without insult, “a quite respectable Ninja Slushi knockoff.” The device arrived with a welcome digital temp readout and a removable back panel that made cleaning easier on the slush chamber. Performance was comparable to the original Ninja, though the user interface was a bit janky. But since last year, the brand’s slushie machines seem to have disappeared, as the brand’s focus moved to air purifiers and humidifiers.
Vibofrost Slushie Machine ($235, sold out after Prime Day): This Vibofrost, like the Chivalz, freezes slushies comparably to the original Ninja Slushi. And like the Chivalz, it has a somewhat irritating child-lock feature, and a timed feature that seems of limited utility. Though it will slush within around 20 to 30 minutes, the oddly designed spout can spray wildly if there’s any liquid in the machine, the drip tray does not attach securely, and it kinda moans like a dying tauntaun while in operation.
Inoviva Slushie Machine for $120: I tested this Inoviva slushie machine twice. The first time, the device registered much louder than competitors, the drip tray arrived stuck to the machine, and the compressor began to fail after a week’s testing. The second time, it was still loud, and the user interface had a difficult-to-navigate locking feature, but freezing was indeed more consistent. The inconsistency in quality control makes this device difficult to recommend. But maybe you’re willing to brave this for a steeply discounted price. The Inoviva also has one terrific feature: The ability to adjust thickness for each drink setting.
My co-tester Kat Merck (on the now-discontinued Chivalz) and I made so very many slushies with each machine, from dairy to nondairy to coffee slushies to straight-up bottles of wine. Specifically, we tested every version of slush that a machine advertised. If Ninja or GreenPan says a machine can make frappés and milkshakes and frozen juices, we made frappés and milkshakes and frozen juices, tinkering where necessary. I froze orange juice and strawberry juice, slushed a bouquet’s worth of rosé, and made slushies from daiquiri to margarita to whiskey Coke. I slushed tamarind micheladas (an excellent idea) and Twisted Tea (a terrible idea).
Photograph: Kat Merck
I also raced the freezing capabilities of all three machines by pouring a 16-ounce can of delicious Mango Mike’s Harder Lemonade in each, then seeing which machine was fastest. (For the XL, I used a 24-ounce can.) And I made smooth and dense coconut-lime daiquiris with coconut milk, according to Ninja’s recipe, to test how well each machine’s dispenser handled a genuine dense-textured challenge.
How Do Home Slushie Machines Work?
The tech is pretty simple, almost ingeniously so: A beefy cylindrical freezing core in the center of the drink chamber continually cools any liquid in contact with it. It’s encircled by a plastic spiral auger attached to a motor. The auger mixes the drink, keeps it slushing instead of freezing solid, and also pushes the resulting slush toward the dispenser nozzle so you can have some. The resolute simplicity of this design allowed Ninja and others to scale down the commercial slushie maker for home consumers thirsty for frozen treats.
The main requirement is that the frozen beverage have more than 4 percent sugar—or between 3 percent and 16 percent alcohol—in order to lower the freezing point of the resulting concoction and make slushing possible. Some slushie machine vendors recommend percentages more like 15 percent sugar, for perfect consistency. But I often balk at this. Coca-Cola and orange juice are each around 11 percent sugar—so that’s very sweet. Some hero of the internet has made a slush calculator for easy reference.
A minimum of 16 ounces of liquid is required for most 88-ounce home machines, for simple reasons: The liquid needs to be in physical contact with the core in order to slush up and also to keep ice from forming on the central cylinder’s surface. The Slushi XL requires a 24-ounce minimum, because it’s bigger.
Can You Put Diet Soda in a Slushie Machine?
No and yes. Slushies rely on a helpful property of water: Sugar (or salt) dissolved in water lowers its freezing point below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Why? Solubles like sugar are chaos agents. Sugar molecules move randomly, refuse to dissolve into ice, and interfere with water’s ability to form hydrogen bonds and turn crystalline. Some water molecules freeze, but sugar water doesn’t. Tada! Slush.
If you try to make a slushie out of sugar-free soda, or sugar-free anything, ice crystals will instead form easily. The stainless steel freezing core will ice over and scrape on the auger, and ice cubes or hunks will gather mass in the slushie machine. The cylinder will start to shake, then the machine will clunk, then eventually you’ll probably break your machine: Low-sugar fail-safes on these devices have not been overly reliable, alas. So don’t try this at home!
This doesn’t mean you’re doomed to massive calories if you want to make a slushie. Not every artificial sweetener lowers the freezing point appropriately, but the one that Ninja recommends for diet slushies is allulose, a rare but naturally occurring sugar that’s 70 percent as sweet as basic sugar but is not metabolized effectively by the human digestive system. This means it’s low in calories and doesn’t cause insulin spikes—but as with a lot of indigestibles, note that side effects can include bloating or GI distress for some.
For easiest use in a slushie, buy liquid allulose. Powdered versions also exist, but to use them, you’ll need to make a simple syrup by heating up the powder in water to help it dissolve, then let it cool. If you just try to drop the allulose powder into your machine with some Diet Coke, it might not dissolve, and you might still get ice formation. Or at least, I definitely still got ice formation when I tried this on the OG Ninja, and had to stop my machine.
How Can You Stop Milkshakes From Getting Foamy in a Slushie Machine?
Bet you didn’t expect a lesson in milk proteins today! But here’s the deal: Milk proteins start to separate when agitated. Churning milk is, in fact, how butter gets made. Proteins separate out, and you get butter on the one side and buttermilk on the other. Both are delicious, but neither is wanted in a milkshake.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
If you try to make a milkshake in a churning slushie machine using just milk, you’ll eventually start to see the effects of these milk proteins separating out from buttermilk—which will manifest first as an undesirable foaminess. To avoid this, Ninja recommends also adding heavy cream or half-and-half to any milkshake recipe. The higher fat content will keep things smoother.
Note it’s easiest to use fruit syrups, rather than just juice, and add vanillin, or it’ll be a bit boring: The heavy fat tends to overwhelm any subtle fruit flavors. Another deep secret of the tasty milkshake? Salt. Add a tiiiinny pinch; it’ll help bring out flavor. A 16-ounce McDonald’s milkshake has 260 milligrams of sodium—about 1/16th of a teaspoon of table salt, or approximately the amount that fits between your index finger and your thumb.
But temper your expectations here. None of the slushie machines we tested made a texture comparable to a classic milkshake. On most machines, which don’t have compressors as powerful as the new-model Ninjas that are now our top picks, the texture is often a little ice-gritty and not as richly textured or integrated as the milkshake you’ll get from your local burger joint, let alone the soft serve from the famously broken ice cream machines at McDonald’s. Slushie machines also can’t handle chunks of frozen fruit, often the best part of a milkshake.
On the newer Ninjas, with their more powerful freezing power, I was able to get the smoothness and freeze I wanted. But because most recipes call for a high-fat mix of 2:1 milk and heavy cream in order ot avoid churning foam and butter, the results still weren’t quite a light milkshake. It was more like a dense, rich, quite tasty soft serve.
Now, do I like being able to make 20-minute soft-serve in my home? From milk and heavy cream and sugar and a dash of vanilla? Heck yes, I do.
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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.”
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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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