Real estate industry players are scratching their heads over the changes a tech revolution will bring to the built environment. At Savills’ recent science conference, held in partnership with NLA at the London Centre, speakers explored what the science sector needs space-wise and how can real estate help it grow.
Sarah Thorley, associate director at Savills, said: “A lot relies on the combination of universities, clinicians and the wider industry to come to an answer.”
In recent years, science-related real estate development has been shifting from a traditional 70:30 lab/office split towards 60:40, with an even 50:50 having the potential to become the new standard. It comes as the rapid growth of AI results in more labs becoming automated.
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Mike Tsang, director of finance and accounts at Aria, a government-funded research agency, said: “AI is cross-cutting across all of innovators’ programmes. I’ve never lived through an industrial revolution before but that’s what we’re seeing at the moment.”
Earlier this year, the public body confirmed the budget for its latest set of programmes, which includes work around AI safety and costs.
The most recent research from Savills found five out of eight science sub-sectors to have hit record investment sums so far this year have some form of AI relationship. The agency has tracked more than £100bn in capital invested in the generative AI, synthetic data, AI neoclouds and artificial general intelligence research sectors.
Steven Lang, director for life sciences and office commercial research at Savills, said: “If you follow the capital, you’re going to follow the company growth, you’re going to follow future demand. And this is where tenants will emerge from, based on funding we’re seeing in the market at the moment.
“As an industry, we’ve got to think about what the real estate needs of those sub-sectors looks like. What seems relatively niche today, or niche to us because we don’t have an understanding of what those sub-sectors are up to, are all potentially going to be massive key occupiers tomorrow.”
Raminderpal Singh, global head of AI and genAI practice at 20/15 Visioneers, stressed the growth of AI may hurt real estate demand going forward: “You’ll need labs, but you’ll need 10 labs instead of 100.”
Come together
Nevertheless, Anne Lane, chief executive at UCL Business, believes that physical spaces will always be needed, even if the use of AI continues to grow. But developers may be forced to adapt traditional real estate models to new working patterns and new jobs.
Lane said: “You’re always going to need physical space to try out all of those computer-generated models in the real world. We’re going to need probably more of the office space to do some of that modelling, drug design and molecular interactions to see how that’s going to work.”
Lane highlighted the Francis Crick Institute’s £650m headquarters building at 1 Midland Road, NW1, as an example of a site that had never been seen before in the UK when it was built just shy of a decade ago. She said: “It’s got space that you can see all the way through the building, and you’ve got areas where people can come together, talk and come up with ideas.”
Jim Al-Khalili, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Surrey, added: “I think that’s to some extent still missing in the UK. We need to think more carefully about how we create these interdisciplinary centres and institutes that are fit for purpose for talents from different disciplines to be able to work together. And that’s a real challenge.”
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