Google launches London AI Campus for students

Big tech usually spends millions bidding for elite PhDs to fuel the AI race. Google is trying a different route: training 16-year-olds in London.

Google officially opened its new AI Campus in Somers Town, Camden. UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer attended the launch, which also happens to be in his local parliamentary constituency.

The initiative is a two-year education pilot built in partnership with Camden Council and Camden Learning, aimed specifically at local sixth-form students aged 16 and older.

DeepMind mentorship for local sixth formers

The pilot kicks off with a tight cohort of just 32 students.

Google says the selection prioritizes diversity and underrepresented backgrounds, including teenagers eligible for Free School Meals.

Those 32 students get front-row access to machine learning resources, alongside mentorship from staff across Google and Google DeepMind.

Instead of purely theoretical lessons, students will work on hands-on projects applying AI to healthcare, social sciences, and the arts.

Starting in mid-2025, the campus plans to widen its doors to the broader Camden student body, offering after-school technology programs and AI masterclasses.

Backing Raspberry Pi to scale nationwide

Alongside the physical hub in Camden, Google is putting cash behind a broader UK rollout.

Google.org is providing over 865,000 pounds in fresh funding to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The money will expand Experience AI, a free educational curriculum originally co-created by Raspberry Pi and Google DeepMind.

Working with ParentZone, the foundation will train teachers across the country, aiming to reach an additional 250,000 students by the end of 2026.

Google claims it has already trained more than one million people and businesses across the UK in digital and AI skills, and recently introduced its AI works initiative to study how tools boost national productivity.

Why it matters

For students from working-class backgrounds, this is an undeniable foot in the door. Getting direct mentorship from Google DeepMind engineers while still in secondary school is an advantage usually reserved for top-tier university labs or well-connected private programs.

From a corporate playbook perspective, Google played this brilliantly. DeepMind's global headquarters sits right next door in King's Cross, inside Camden, which also happens to be the Prime Minister's home political district. Sponsoring local community education right on the Prime Minister's doorstep delivers immense political and public-relations goodwill.

The catch, however, is scale. An initial cohort of 32 students is essentially an elite boutique pilot, not an educational overhaul. Mentoring teenagers one-on-one with senior AI researchers cannot scale to hundreds of thousands.

That makes the 865,000-pound grant to the Raspberry Pi Foundation the real metric to watch. If the teacher-training model actually reaches 250,000 pupils by 2026, it will deliver genuine systemic impact. If not, the London campus risks looking like an exceptionally well-placed photo op.