Maybe this time Silicon Valley will have to move over — London made a fresh bid on Thursday to become a world center for high-tech and startups.
London Mayor Boris Johnson said he wanted to make the city the “tech capital of the world.”
The high-technology sector in the British capital has grown out of the trendy east London district of Shoreditch and now stretches out to the Olympic Park several kilometers away.
“There is nowhere to rival London for tech firms to thrive and grow — we have the talent, the investors, and the entrepreneurial spirit,” Johnson said.
The prevalence of startups around Old Street roundabout has seen it dubbed “Silicon Roundabout,” but while the area is far from the gleaming offices of California’s Silicon Valley, the British government is pushing the sector hard.
The Tech City body, which has been helping companies set up in London since 2010, says there are now 1,300 compared with 200 when it was created, and they employ more than 155,000 people.
Johnson said the Olympic Park — the site of the 2012 Games, which is now reopening in a reconfigured form — was “ripe both for new startups and more established operations.”
Tech City says one sign of the attractiveness of the British capital for the high-tech sector is the 75 percent growth in the number of foreign companies investing there.
Not everyone is happy — some of the original startups in Shoreditch claim they have been priced out by rapidly rising rents as the tech giants move in.
Yet key players in the sector who gathered with Johnson at the TechHub — a center where other entrepreneurs can come for advice — said London was a highly attractive destination with huge potential.
Michael Acton Smith, the CEO of Mind Candy, the makers of the global hit Moshi Monsters, said: “Confidence in London is rising, startups are flourishing, you can feel the crackle of energy and potential in the air.”
Social networking giant Facebook Inc is expanding fast in London because it is such a “rich source of engineering and technology talent,” company vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa Nicola Mendelsohn said.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
NATIONAL SECURITY: Intel’s testing of ACM tools despite US government control ‘highlights egregious gaps in US technology protection policies,’ a former official said Chipmaker Intel Corp has tested chipmaking tools this year from a toolmaker with deep roots in China and two overseas units that were targeted by US sanctions, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Intel, which fended off calls for its CEO’s resignation from US President Donald Trump in August over his alleged ties to China, got the tools from ACM Research Inc, a Fremont, California-based producer of chipmaking equipment. Two of ACM’s units, based in Shanghai and South Korea, were among a number of firms barred last year from receiving US technology over claims they have
OPTION: Uber said it could provide higher pay for batch trips, if incentives for batching is not removed entirely, as the latter would force it to pass on the costs to consumers Uber Technologies Inc yesterday warned that proposed restrictions on batching orders and minimum wages could prompt a NT$20 delivery fee increase in Taiwan, as lower efficiency would drive up costs. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi made the remarks yesterday during his visit to Taiwan. He is on a multileg trip to the region, which includes stops in South Korea and Japan. His visit coincided the release last month of the Ministry of Labor’s draft bill on the delivery sector, which aims to safeguard delivery workers’ rights and improve their welfare. The ministry set the minimum pay for local food delivery drivers at
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
RSS