Microsoft to Open New AI Hub in London

Microsoft is planning to open a new AI hub in London to take advantage of the talent pool of AI scientists and engineers in the area. The news was announced today by Mustafa Suleyman, the new Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI who previously co-founded the AI startups DeepMind (later acquired by Google) and Inflection.

This new AI hub will be led by Jordan Hoffman, an AI scientist and engineer who also previously worked at DeepMind and Inflection. Suleyman described Hoffman as “an exceptional AI scientist and engineer” who will be assisted by Microsoft AI team members already based in London, as well as new hires.

“Microsoft AI London will drive pioneering work to advance state-of-the-art language models and their supporting infrastructure, and to create world-class tooling for foundation models, collaborating closely with our AI teams across Microsoft and with our partners, including OpenAI,” Suleyman said today.

The Redmond giant already has a solid presence in the UK thanks to its Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, which remains the company’s only research laboratory in Europe. Microsoft also recently announced in tandem with the UK government that it would invest £2.5 billion in the country over the next 3 years to expand its AI infrastructure in the country and train more than one million people for the AI economy.

“There is an enormous pool of AI talent and expertise in the U.K., and Microsoft AI plans to make a significant, long-term investment in the region as we begin hiring the best AI scientists and engineers into this new AI hub,” Suleyman said today. The exec added that the company will start posting job openings for this new AI hub in London in the coming weeks.