OpenAI pauses UK Stargate

OpenAI has paused its planned Stargate data-center project in Britain, saying U.K. energy prices and regulation do not support long-term investment. (cnbc.com) The company announced Stargate U.K. in September 2025 with Nvidia and London-based Nscale, and said it would explore leasing up to 8,000 graphics processing units in the first quarter of 2026, with room to scale to 31,000 over time. (cnbc.com) OpenAI said it will revisit the project when “the right conditions” exist, and a person with direct knowledge told CNBC that OpenAI and Nscale are still in discussions about a future version of the deal. Nscale declined to comment to CNBC. (cnbc.com) A data center is the warehouse behind artificial intelligence services: rows of chips, power systems, and cooling equipment that run models and store data. Stargate U.K. was meant to put more of that computing capacity inside Britain for public services, finance, research, and national security work. (cnbc.com) The pause lands in the middle of the British government’s push to turn the country into an artificial intelligence infrastructure hub. The government’s January 2025 AI Opportunities Action Plan promised faster planning approvals, better grid access, and new “AI Growth Zones” to attract data-center investment. (gov.uk, datacenterdynamics.com) One of the proposed Stargate sites was Cobalt Park in northeast England, part of a government-designated AI Growth Zone. By January 2026, the government said it had designated five AI Growth Zones and secured £68 billion in pledged investment since January 2025. (cnbc.com, delivery.ai.gov.uk) OpenAI also pointed to regulation, especially copyright rules for training artificial intelligence models on protected material. In a March 2026 report, the U.K. government said it was dropping its earlier preferred idea of a broad copyright exception with an opt-out after most consultation responses rejected it. (gov.uk) That leaves Britain trying to expand artificial intelligence capacity while key rules on training data are still unsettled. Politico reported that OpenAI said predictable rules on issues such as copyright shape its investment decisions, while the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said it is still working with OpenAI and other companies to build U.K. compute capacity. (politico.eu, gov.uk) OpenAI is not pulling back from Britain entirely. On April 13, 2026, it said it had signed a lease for its first permanent London office, an 88,500-square-foot site in King’s Cross with capacity for more than 500 employees, after saying in February that London would become its largest research hub outside the United States. (cnbc.com) So the U.K. is still getting OpenAI staff and office space, but not yet the chip-filled infrastructure project ministers had promoted as proof Britain could host more of the machinery behind artificial intelligence. (cnbc.com, cnbc.com)