OpenAI has chosen London as its largest research hub outside of the United States, signaling a strong vote of confidence in the city. The company, known for developing ChatGPT, plans to further increase investment in its London hub, which currently employs around 30 researchers.

The London team contributes to key components of OpenAI's work, including the AI-powered coding assistant Codex and the large language model GPT-5.2. OpenAI cited the UK's world-class talent in machine learning and the sciences, a strong culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration, as well as leading universities and scientific institutions as reasons for investing in London.

This move comes as OpenAI looks to battle for talent against the likes of Google's DeepMind, which employs around 2,000 people in the UK. Researchers in London will have a key role in the development of OpenAI's frontier models, strengthening the work on data, evaluation, alignment and reliability to ensure that advanced AI systems are safe, robust and useful.

For those evaluating on-premise deployments, there are trade-offs that AI-RADAR analyzes in detail in the /llm-onpremise section.