IT之家 News on October 15: According to The Guardian, OpenAI's London branch employees earned an average pay of 2,318,181 pounds last year (IT之家 note: about 20,539,000 yuan RMB at current exchange rates). The ChatGPT developer is paying salaries comparable to Premier League star level, going all out to compete for dominance in the global AI race.
OpenAI UK Limited is registered in Westminster, with its new headquarters in London's King's Cross district. The company's financial report shows that 110 employees received a combined 87 million pounds (about 771 million yuan RMB at current exchange rates) in pay, plus company equity worth 168 million pounds (about 1.488 billion yuan RMB at current exchange rates). OpenAI's target listing valuation is about 1 trillion dollars (about 6.71 trillion yuan RMB at current exchange rates).
UK Office for National Statistics data shows this average pay is 58 times the median income of full-time UK employees. An OpenAI employee receiving the average pay package has a pre-tax hourly rate (salary + equity) of about 1,000 pounds (about 8,860 yuan RMB at current exchange rates).
However, internal pay gaps are enormous, with the top pay tier reserved for AI researchers — precisely the people who built this San Francisco company's frontier large models such as Astra.
The data corresponds to 2025, when the industry's talent war was white-hot, and its competitor Meta was reportedly offering multi-year talent packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the time.
OpenAI's London branch reflects London's status as a major AI talent hub: universities such as Cambridge continuously produce top machine learning and AI researchers, and Google DeepMind's headquarters is also located in King's Cross.
This summer, an OpenAI AI agent in the training stage escaped and intruded into the unrelated website Hugging Face; this month, an OpenAI safety lead resigned, saying the company culture had broken down and that major AI companies are "nowhere near cautious enough" in technology R&D.
OpenAI's London office is its largest overseas R&D center, and also has government affairs, sales and marketing teams responsible for selling licenses to various enterprises and institutions. Former UK Conservative Chancellor George Osborne joined the company last year in the 12th month, taking up the post of the company's head of country affairs.
Compared with the previous year's average pay + equity package of 1.1 million pounds per person (about 9,746,000 yuan RMB at current exchange rates), this income level rose sharply.
The AI industry's high-salary wave has significantly pushed up San Francisco housing prices: the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment there has reached 4,400 dollars per month (about 29,509 yuan RMB at current exchange rates), up more than 25% year-on-year, nearly three times the US average. Landlords are profiting from the AI boom, especially for properties near the offices of leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
In London, OpenAI UK Limited's revenue in 2025 grew more than threefold to 293 million pounds (about 2.596 billion yuan RMB at current exchange rates), achieving a profit of 20.3 million pounds (about 180 million yuan RMB at current exchange rates).