  In the Steiner point removal (SPR) problem, we are given a (weighted) graph
$G$ and a subset $T$ of its vertices called terminals, and the goal is to
compute a (weighted) graph $H$ on $T$ that is a minor of $G$, such that the
distance between every pair of terminals is preserved to within some small
multiplicative factor, that is called the stretch of $H$.
  It has been shown that on general graphs we can achieve stretch $O(\log |T|)$
[Filtser, 2018]. On the other hand, the best-known stretch lower bound is $8$
[Chan-Xia-Konjevod-Richa, 2006], which holds even for trees. In this work, we
show an improved lower bound of $\tilde\Omega\big(\sqrt{\log |T|}\big)$.
