Runway, the New York AI company best known for its Gen-series video tools, is planting a serious flag in Europe. The company announced that London will become its European headquarters and its newest research hub focused on general world models, the AI systems it now considers its core bet.

The money leads. Runway plans to invest more than $200 million into the UK's AI ecosystem by the end of 2028. The company framed the rollout in two stages: $100 million into the UK AI ecosystem over the next 18 months, with that figure more than doubling through 2028 as it scales European operations.

What Runway is now

Most people still know Runway as a video-generation tool that turns a text prompt or a still image into a short clip. The company has been reframing its ambition. It built the Gen-series models that produce short clips from text or images, and has since aimed at something broader: AI that simulates the physical world, with applications across film, gaming, science, and robotics.

That shift centers on what the company calls world models. A large language model learns from text. A world model learns from sensory data. Runway describes it as an AI system that learns a physical environment from audio, images, video, and real-world data rather than language alone. The pitch is that this kind of model can predict and simulate how the physical world behaves, which is why Runway keeps listing robotics and industrial simulation alongside filmmaking.