OpenAI backs off Norway data plan
OpenAI has abandoned plans to rent capacity from a planned data centre in northern Norway and is instead leaning more heavily on its partnership with Microsoft for compute. The shift was reported as part of OpenAI’s ongoing reassessment of where and how it sources large‑scale capacity. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
OpenAI has dropped its plan to rent computing capacity directly from a new data center near Narvik, Norway, and Microsoft is taking that capacity instead. (cnbc.com) The site was announced on July 31, 2025 as “Stargate Norway,” a project backed by OpenAI, Nscale, and Aker in northern Norway. OpenAI said then that the campus would start with 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units and eventually scale higher. (openai.com, nscale.com) Nscale said on April 14, 2026 that Microsoft had expanded its Norway agreement to add more than 30,000 Nvidia Rubin graphics processing units at the 230-megawatt Narvik campus in 2027. Bloomberg reported that this was capacity first intended for OpenAI. (nscale.com, bloomberg.com) A data center is the warehouse-scale computer system that trains and runs artificial intelligence models, and power is the hard constraint. Narvik was pitched as attractive because it has hydropower, cooler temperatures, and industrial-scale grid access. (openai.com, news.microsoft.com) The reversal lands less than a year after OpenAI used Norway to show that Stargate could expand beyond the United States. In January 2025, OpenAI said Stargate would be built with SoftBank, Oracle, Nvidia, and Microsoft as part of a broader push for new artificial intelligence infrastructure. (openai.com, blogs.microsoft.com) OpenAI’s infrastructure map has shifted several times since then. In September 2025, the company said Stargate also covered data center partnerships with Oracle, SoftBank, and CoreWeave, while adding that Microsoft would continue to provide cloud services “including through Stargate.” (openai.com, openai.com) That leaves Microsoft in a stronger position at one of Europe’s most ambitious artificial intelligence campuses even as OpenAI says it wants more compute options. CNBC reported this week that OpenAI is discussing renting the Norway compute from Microsoft rather than directly from Nscale. (cnbc.com, blogs.microsoft.com) For Norway, the project itself is still moving ahead in Narvik with Microsoft, Nscale, and Aker attached to the buildout. For OpenAI, the change narrows one route to owning capacity directly and pushes it back toward buying access through partners. (nscale.com, news.microsoft.com)
