“The average annual salary is 480 million won, and cases exceeding 1 billion won are common”… Hogwarts of the AI ​​industry, which spends trillions of won every year [테크토크] : ZUM News

Harry Potter tourist attraction, King’s Cross in London

Now an AI melting pot with global big tech

Paradigm-changing AI technology is produced here

Anyone who has read the fantasy novel ‘Harry Potter’ will know London’s King’s Cross Station. In the novel, it was set as a train station leading to the magic school ‘Hogwarts’, and thanks to this, King’s Cross in reality also emerged as a representative tourist attraction in England.

Platform 9 and 3/4 at King’s Cross Station in London in the first Harry Potter movie. After the success of the novel and movie, the actual filming location became a representative tourist attraction. [이미지출처=해리 포터 영화 스틸]

However, King’s Cross is not simply a location featured in popular novels and movies. This is the best tech-dense region in Europe and one of the world’s most densely populated areas, and can be called an ‘AI melting pot’ where cutting-edge research related to artificial intelligence (AI) is conducted. The winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, part of the British scientific community, also work here.

Google’s ‘electronic brain’ at Harry Potter train station

The AI ​​research complexes of many big tech companies, including Google, are concentrated in a dense building complex between St. Pancras Station (right), the filming location of Harry Potter, and the actual King’s Cross Station (left). [이미지출처=구글 맵스]

If Harry Potter’s King’s Cross is the gateway to the wizarding world, real-life King’s Cross is a European transportation hub. It is the terminal station of the Eurostar, which connects France and the UK, as well as various routes connecting all British cities. Thanks to this, conditions were optimal for talent from all over the world to gather, and high-tech industries flourished. In the narrow space between King’s Cross Station and St. Pancras Station, 10 to 20-story buildings are lined up. The British branch of the American big tech company ‘Google’ and the headquarters of the world’s largest AI company ‘DeepMind’ are located here. According to data from the British Companies Registry, as of last year, Google employed 7,400 people here, and DeepMind is also believed to have employed thousands. (DeepMind does not disclose information about its researchers.)

According to reports from several British media outlets, Google’s London office and DeepMind develop nearly all AI technologies used by Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Gemini, a counterpart to ChatGPT, as well as AI that manages YouTube’s video data transmission and reception, AI that designs Google semiconductors such as TPU, and DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis and DeepMind director John M. Jumper, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year. ‘Alpha Fold’, which participated in the development, was also born here.

Average annual salary: 480 million won… All the world’s AI stars gathered together

‘Alphafold’ is the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Developed by Google DeepMind, a British AI research company. [이미지출처=구글 딥마인드]

The amount of money Google has invested here so far is truly enormous. For example, last year, Google paid an average of 266,000 pounds (approximately 480 million won) in total annual salary (the sum of basic salary and stock options) to each employee here. It is said that it is common for senior developers or ‘star’ AI researchers to be recruited with an annual salary exceeding 1 billion won. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, spends more than trillions of won every year on the King’s Cross branch alone. As a result, everyone from professors from the most prestigious English-speaking universities to European scholars gathered at King’s Cross to form an AI research ‘dream team’. Especially for researchers on the European continent, where there is no big tech, DeepMind is like the Hogwarts of the AI ​​industry.

King’s Cross was not a forward base for global big tech from the beginning. It used to be a slum district where London’s poor lived. However, with the opening of the Eurostar train, redevelopment took place, and in particular, the UK’s ‘tech boom’ that began in 2010 changed the fate of King’s Cross. London, which was hit hard by the global financial crisis in 2008, turned to the tech industry as a new growth engine, and over a decade of policy support and investment has borne early fruit.

Today, King’s Cross and the surrounding area are home to many tech companies. A little north of Google’s base is the UK branch of Meta (formerly Facebook), which also employs about 7,000 engineers. ‘Wave’, a self-driving AI development company considered Tesla’s rival, also has a research center nearby. It is also home to the Francis Crick Research Institute, a large biotechnology research facility with over 1,500 doctoral level employees. This is also the background that allowed DeepMind to pursue cutting-edge AI and bio research simultaneously.

Growth or sovereignty? AI strategy deepens consideration

King’s Cross ‘Landscraper’, scheduled for completion in 2025. It is a large building over 300 meters long, and about 5,000 of the world’s best AI scientists will work here. [이미지출처=연합뉴스]

The UK is often compared to the ‘invisible champion’ of the AI ​​industry. This is because British businessmen and scientists have played an important role in the current development of AI. In fact, famous AI companies such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI all have AI research centers in the UK. In the semiconductor field, the British company ARM Holdings has a deep cooperative relationship with NVIDIA thanks to its design of CPUs optimized for AI tasks.

But the invisible champion is, in other words, This means that there are few ‘native’ British players.It is also. Of course, the UK has the largest AI startup ecosystem in Europe today, but it is nothing compared to America’s mega-big techs.

Some are concerned that Britain could become like a ‘big Israel’. Israel also boasts cutting-edge technology, but Israeli companies are usually subsidiaries of big American tech companies or B2B companies that only procure technology from the United States. Similarly, the UK’s tech economy could also face the fate of being ‘locked’ to the US.

But at the same time, it is highly likely that AlphaFold would not have been created if large American IT companies had not acquired startups like DeepMind. The UK has emerged at the center of the AI ​​industry with excellent technology and talent, and a strategy of boldly opening its doors to overseas capital. Instead, how to secure the ‘sovereignty’ of AI still remains a challenge.

Conversely, countries such as Korea and Japan may find it easier to maintain AI sovereignty by taking advantage of their characteristics as non-English speaking countries. However, in the current environment where key talent and capital in the AI ​​industry are increasingly flocking to the Anglo-American region, it seems difficult for AI sovereign countries to achieve full-scale growth. Growth strategy and sovereignty strategy, in the end, both have advantages and disadvantages.

Reporter Lim Joo-hyung [email protected]

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