“It remains one of the huge competitive advantages that you can get the same, or better, talent for cheaper and less churn,” said Matt Clifford, a co-founder of Entrepreneur First, a start-up incubator in London that recruits students from Cambridge and Oxford. Entrepreneur First helped create Magic Pony, yet another A.I. company, which Twitter acquired for $150 million in 2016.

But some wonder whether these companies could better serve Britain by staying independent.

Ian Hogarth trained as a machine learning researcher at Cambridge, founded the live music app Songkick and is now an angel investor in Britain. He argued that if DeepMind had remained an independent, it may have grown into the country’s first tech superpower.

Following a similar path were start-ups like VocalIQ (acquired by Apple) and Evi, the company that Amazon acquired in 2013 as part of its effort to build the Alexa digital assistant. Evi was the foundation for Amazon’s Cambridge operation.

Many have applauded the enormous economic change these acquisitions are helping to drive in London and Cambridge. But not everyone is clapping.

Last year, in Cambridge, a new housing development was vandalized with graffiti written in Latin: “Locus in Domos Loci Populum.” As the BBC reported, this translates to “local homes for local people.” As the tech workers land the big salaries, home prices are skyrocketing, and the locals are being squeezed out. It is yet another example of Silicon Fen’s looking a lot like Silicon Valley.