Three UK cities make world’s 10 ‘smartest’ tech hubs – and Oxford is higher than Silicon Valley

London, Oxford and Cambridge are among the 10 most vibrant tech centres in the world, according to a closely watched study which found that Singapore had leapfrogged both Zurich and London to clinch top spot.

The two university towns both climbed up the rankings of Z/Yen’s Smart Centres Index, making Britain the only country to boast three different tech clusters in the world’s top 10 smartest cities. The biannual study, which assesses towns and cities ability to create, develop and deploy world-leading technology, ranked Singapore as the world’s smartest city for the time in the study’s history.

The east Asian city-state boasts a glut of high-skilled tech talent and is home to fast-growing juggernauts like ‘superapp’ Grab, and the Alibaba-backed e-commerce platform, Lazada. New York also rose sharply up the rankings, climbing four places from the previous poll conducted in December, while London slipped one place into third to round off the top three.

Tech talent powers Oxford and Cambridge up rankings

But authors said that a Southeast cluster that included Cambridge and Oxford together with the capital would more than likely have topped the rankings, in a sign of Britain’s increasing heft on the international tech stage.

Oxford climbed above tech-utopia San Fancisco – home to Silicon Valley – for the first time in 13 Smart Centres rankings, buoyed by the number of fast-growing spin-offs emerging from its historic university.

Both it and Cambridge have produced a wave of increasingly valuable start-ups and scale-ups in recent years, including quantum computing industry leader Oxford Ionics and Bicycle Therapeutics, a pioneering life sciences firm.

The government has made facilitating the two towns’ success as economic hubs in their own right a linchpin of its bid to revive economic growth in Britain, and has pushed through plans for a train line connecting the two universities.

The proposals, which will be further bolstered by a government-endorsed housebuilding programme, could add up to £78bn to the British economy, ministers have said.

London fell into third place despite a wave of fresh investment into the so-called Knowledge Quarter hub in King’s Cross from some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing tech firms in the past six months. The north London neighbourhood has become Europe’s principal hub for artificial intelligence-based companies, with Antrhopic, OpenAI and Google all expanding heavily in the area. It has also long been the home to some of Britain’s most vibrant start-ups, including Wayve, Alphatbet-owned Deepmind and the AI video lab Synthesia.

Professor Michael Mainelli, a former Lord Mayor of London and chairman of Z/Yen, said: “Centres with a deep commitment to skills development continue to perform well.

“The competition to lead the way in the application of science and technology continues to drive development in the world’s commercial centres.”