糖心视频

AI megadeals

puts venture funding in AI at $407 billion across 3,500 transactions in the first half, already above the total for 2025. The shape matters as much as the size: frontier labs took 71% of the money, while vertical applications (companies building AI products for a specific industry on top of the frontier models, in healthcare, financial services, IT, industrial and consumer markets) accounted for 63% of the deals but 13% of the capital, and Q2 deal count fell 22% even as AI absorbed 64% of all venture dollars. PitchBook expects concentration, not scarcity, to define the rest of the year. There is no shortage of capital chasing AI, and tighter credit after the Iran-driven inflation shock will only temper it at the margin. The money is flowing to a narrowing set of perceived long-term winners at the frontier and infrastructure layers while everyone else competes for the remainder. For occupier markets, that means a handful of very large, fast-growing requirements.

Three British names sit in the top ten deals of the quarter: Isomorphic Labs ($2.1 billion), Wayve ($1.26 billion at $8.6 billion) and Ineffable Intelligence ($1.1 billion seed at $5.1 billion. All three are in London, and all three should be in expansion mode as a result.

Two other useful points to note. Semiconductor Series A pre-money valuations jumped from under $60 million to a median of $520 million, and autonomous machines funding doubled to $52 billion, pointing to light industrial and hybrid schemes.

Chips with everything

Three announcements in three weeks have made the UK chip cluster impossible to ignore. closed a $100 million seed round on Thursday, one of Europe鈥檚 largest, led by Atomico and including equity investment from the £500 million Sovereign AI Fund. The company was founded by talent from Cambridge University and says it has built a software layer that removes reliance on any single frontier model or chip.

is in talks to raise around $600 million at a $6.5 billion valuation, six times its May mark, on the back of a $250 million chip supply deal with Anthropic. The company was founded by talent from Oxford University.

And raised $312 million at a $3.3 billion valuation, with Arm and the Sovereign AI Fund among the backers. The firm is designing the next generation of AI chips. The guy behind the company is 25, and this is not his first venture. He taught himself to code as a teen and founded neurotech company CoMind. He is also a fellow of the Thiel Fellowship, which gives funding to young people with bright ideas. For real estate, following the talent in this fellowship is a good way to identify the next exciting potential scale-up.

So that is three UK companies looking to transform the chip industry and take on the big players.

For real estate, the geography is interesting. All three are London-headquartered, but the engineering is going to Bristol. Fractile has committed £100 million to UK operations, including a ; Olix is in both cities. A London鈥揃ristol semiconductor corridor is forming.

The defence tech barbell

PitchBook鈥檚 Q2 Defence Tech Report describes a barbell. Investors put $16.4 billion into 249 defence deals in the quarter, the trailing twelve-month total of $69.5 billion is up 63%, and defence is now around 7% of global venture capital. Anduril鈥檚 $5 billion raise at $61 billion was 30% of the quarter alone. Autonomous systems accounted for 42% of capital, with autonomous manufacturing, UAVs, and unmanned maritime being the fastest-growing segments, and the munitions and hypersonics segment jumped from $20 million to $665 million. That is money for making physical things: production floors, testing areas and secure workshops, increasingly funded by sovereign and corporate capital that wants portfolio companies close to primes and government customers.

US defence tech companies are receiving the majority of funding, which can impact UK real estate, so it is worth tracking how these companies intend to use the capital raised and whether they have secured UK contracts鈥攕omething we do at 糖心视频.

The engineers move into the lab.

have created a co-innovation hub , where forward-deployed AWS engineers sit alongside Novo鈥檚 R&D teams to compress the path from target to first human dose. It is Novo鈥檚 third AI partnership in a year, after OpenAI and the Gefion supercomputer. Elsewhere, announced a new science and innovation centre in Hyderabad鈥檚 Genome Valley, fusing wet-lab science and AI and digital innovation. Earlier in the year, Eli Lilly formed a partnership with Nvidia for a joint co-innovation AI lab in the San Francisco Bay Area. So far this year, big pharma AI deals have reached $13 billion.

Two further signals from pharma this week. 鈥檚 personalised mRNA melanoma vaccine met its primary goal in a 1,100-patient Phase 3 trial, the first late-stage success for any mRNA cancer therapy. Moderna鈥檚 shares closed up around 177%, validating the platform behind Moderna鈥檚 Harwell facility. And from Cambridge, Massachusetts, a year after its $9.1 billion purchase of Blueprint Medicines, and closing two Blueprint buildings.

Big pharma is investing in AI labs, often in partnership with tech, either by designing spaces within their existing portfolios or in new locations, while also restructuring their global footprint in response to M&A and the transformation of their drug pipelines.

The technician talent pipeline

received T Level results, up 65% on last year, with a pass rate above 92%. The mix is what counts for science and innovation. reports 8,307 completions (42%) in engineering- and technology-related pathways, up 46%, with construction, digital and engineering routes making up most of the total, behind education and health. Furthermore, engineering and technology recorded the largest rise in university acceptances of any subject, up 14% to 34,100.

The education policy backdrop is shifting fast, and in a direction that could change clustering activity. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has that schools across England will offer technical subjects alongside academic ones from Year 10, starting September 2028, with the pathways designed by mayors, colleges and employers around local growth sectors rather than set in Whitehall. The statement of 31 July devolves the 16 to 19 education budget to mayors for the first time. The government announced new Technical Excellence Colleges aligned to sectors that are part of the Industrial Strategy.

Taken together, these amount to a deliberate attempt to wire skills supply to place and sector, and the map they draw is instructive. The five defence TECs are in Plymouth, Yeovil, Blackpool, Lincoln and Rotherham. The digital TECs sit in Manchester, Birmingham, Gloucestershire, Milton Keynes and London; advanced manufacturing in Wolverhampton, Durham, Stafford; clean energy in Teesside, Liverpool, Somerset, Colchester and south London.

Three implications follow. Clusters with technical training routes will become stickier because an occupier gains access to a placement pipeline. Mayors will compete for occupiers using skills as the lever, and the colleges themselves become occupiers. While they are already established, they may need to expand.

The evidence for healthy places

Finally, tracked 3,400 children in London and Luton from 2018 to 2022. They found that London children鈥檚 lung growth, initially stunted, caught up with that of children in Luton after the ULEZ was introduced.

It is not an isolated finding. Stockholm鈥檚 congestion charge cut nitrogen dioxide (NO2, the gas produced by combustion engines) and PM10 (coarse particulate matter from exhausts, brakes and tyres, small enough to be inhaled) by 15 to 20% and was followed by a among under-fives; Barcelona鈥檚 superblocks, which strip through-traffic from residential grids, were to add almost 200 days to adult life expectancy if rolled out citywide, and the first three built report better sleep, wellbeing and social interaction. On green space, the finds a three-year gap in male life expectancy between English neighbourhoods with the most and least access to it, and a links residential green space, especially small pocket parks, to lower mortality. Taken together, the evidence points one way: the design of streets, air and open space around a workplace is a measurable health input.

In other news...

, the £382 million investor in spinouts from Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, is opening a San Francisco office to connect its portfolio with US capital.

, the algorithm-driven VC co-founded by Revolut鈥檚 Nik Storonsky, closed an oversubscribed $500 million second fund.

, advised by former GCHQ director Sir Jeremy Fleming, raised £35 million this week to build and back security startups.

The secured a £300 million debt package this week from ING, ABN AMRO, Santander, the Scottish National Investment Bank and Siemens, underpinned by a £202 million National Wealth Fund guarantee covering 80% of the bank tranche. DataVita will expand its Airdrie DV1 site and build DV3, , with capacity ; Dell is moving its Scottish team to the zone鈥檚 Mercury House. The structure is the story: the state is explicitly taking on credit risk to finance AI infrastructure. Some perspective from : the two sites create roughly 100 permanent roles, and Dell鈥檚 move is an administrative office.