![Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions. A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes. “It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes. One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. Of mysterious origins To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett. “Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?” For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine. #Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO](https://i0.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/black-hole-hierarchial-mergers-1280x853.jpg?ssl=1 "Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions. A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes. “It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes. One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. Of mysterious origins To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett. “Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?” For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine. #Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO")
Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes![Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions. A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes. “It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes. One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. Of mysterious origins To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett. “Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?” For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine. #Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/black-hole-hierarchial-mergers-1280x853.jpg "Scientists Say Some Black Holes Are Born From Other Black Holes
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions. A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes. “It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes. One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. Of mysterious origins To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett. “Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?” For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine. #Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO")
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions.
A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star.
“Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible
Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes.
“It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint
The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes.
One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above.
Of mysterious origins
To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett.
“Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?”
For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine.
#Scientists #Black #Holes #Born #Black #HolesBlack holes,Gravitational wave,LIGO
Since LIGO’s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of signals from black hole mergers. And, after a decade of studying gravitational waves, researchers believe a significant fraction of black holes may come from cosmic chain reactions.
A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes an analysis of 155 pairs of binary black holes, identified by LIGO and its sisters, Virgo and KAGRA, in Italy and Japan, respectively. According to the study, about 14% of merging black holes may be what’s called “second-generation black holes,” or black holes that form from previous mergers of two smaller black holes. This “hierarchical” backstory is vastly different from the textbook version of how black holes emerge from the explosive death of a star.
“Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time,” Cailin Plunkett, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told MIT News. “Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”
Tracking the invisible
Gravitational waves that reach Earth’s detectors typically come from extremely intense events. Over the years, LIGO has picked up some truly perplexing signals. For example, last summer it found the most colossal black hole merger ever—and if that wasn’t wild enough, the black holes that took part in the merger lie within a cosmic “dead zone” for black holes.
This zone refers to a range of black hole masses in which, physically speaking, black holes can’t form through ordinary stellar collapse. From these discoveries, astronomers realized just how little we knew about black holes, which are challenging to investigate directly. In that sense, it was a no-brainer that the ever-growing catalog of LIGO’s gravitational signals would turn up entirely new insights about black holes.
“It is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,” the researchers wrote in the latest paper. “These observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.”
A wobbly imprint
The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or “precess,” the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes.
One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they’re “lopsided,” meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above.
Of mysterious origins
To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could “repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,” Plunkett said.
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned “death zones” for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn’t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett.
“Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive,” she mused. “And the question is: Where did they come from?”
For now, it’s hard to say when we’ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine.
![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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