U.S. AI company Runway will make London its European headquarters and invest more than $200 million in the UK artificial intelligence ecosystem by the end of 2028. CNBC reported on Sunday that Runway plans to expand its European business and research organisation from London.

Runway recently raised $315 million in a Series E investment round. General Atlantic, AMD Ventures and Nvidia participated, and the company was valued at $5.3 billion.

Runway is developing a world model that learns from audio, images, video and real-world data. Unlike large language models focused on understanding and generating language, a world model is an AI system that learns a physical environment based on sensory information from the real world. Runway also provides video generation and editing tools.

Anastasis Germanidis (아나스타시스 게르마니디스), Runway's co-founder and co-chief executive, said London is close to major European customers such as the BBC, Fremantle and WPP, and that the company already has a base for a local research team. He added that Runway chose London as a starting point because its talent pool is strong and that it will expand further across Europe in the near future.

The UK government welcomed the investment. Kanishka Narayan (카니슈카 나라얀), the UK's minister for AI, said Runway's new London hub will bring world model research to the UK and support development across industries including film, games, science and robotics.

U.S. artificial intelligence companies are also continuing to expand into London. Anthropic announced in April plans to expand into new office space in London to accommodate 800 people, and OpenAI unveiled plans a few days later to open its first permanent office in the UK capital. Google is also scheduled to move staff to its new UK headquarters this summer.