Microsoft absorbs Stargate site
Microsoft agreed to take over data‑center capacity in Norway that had been marketed for OpenAI’s Stargate project, and reports say it will deploy tens of thousands of Nvidia chips at the site. Coverage frames the move as Microsoft buying capacity that OpenAI had planned to use, with one report citing a deployment of about 30,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin chips. (bloomberg.com (technobezz.com).
Microsoft has taken over artificial-intelligence computing capacity at a Norway site that had been lined up for OpenAI’s Stargate buildout. (bloomberg.com) Bloomberg reported on April 14 that Microsoft agreed to rent capacity from Nscale at a campus in Narvik, Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. Nscale said Microsoft will rent 30,000 additional Nvidia Vera Rubin chips there, on top of an earlier $6.2 billion commitment at the same site. (bloomberg.com) CNBC reported on April 15 that OpenAI dropped plans to rent the compute directly from Nscale and said it was discussing renting that compute from Microsoft instead. That leaves Microsoft as the immediate customer for capacity that had been marketed as part of OpenAI’s Stargate effort. (cnbc.com) A data center is a warehouse-sized cluster of servers, power systems, and cooling gear. In this case, the key asset is access to Nvidia chips that train and run artificial-intelligence models, which has become one of the tightest bottlenecks in the industry. (openai.com) Stargate is OpenAI’s infrastructure program with SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, announced in January 2025 with a stated plan to invest heavily in artificial-intelligence computing. OpenAI later said Stargate had expanded to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity across United States sites including Abilene, Texas, and new locations in Texas and New Mexico. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) The Norway campus had been presented in July 2025 as OpenAI’s first European Stargate site. Data Center Dynamics reported then that Nscale and Aker were developing an initial 230-megawatt facility that could add another 290 megawatts and start with 100,000 graphics processing units. (datacenterdynamics.com) Microsoft’s move shows how fluid those capacity plans have become. OpenAI said in August 2025 that Microsoft would continue to provide cloud services for OpenAI, including through Stargate, even as OpenAI added Oracle, SoftBank, and CoreWeave to its infrastructure mix. (openai.com) Nscale’s earlier Microsoft deal already tied the Norway project to the software company before this week’s shift. Data Center Dynamics reported in October 2025 that Microsoft had signed a five-year, $6 billion agreement for compute from Nscale, with service starting in 2026 and power sourced from renewable energy. (datacenterdynamics.com) The chip detail also matters because Vera Rubin is Nvidia’s next-generation artificial-intelligence platform, with broader availability expected in the second half of 2026. If Nscale delivers 30,000 of those chips in Narvik, Microsoft would be locking in future capacity at a site OpenAI once planned to anchor. (technobezz.com) (bloomberg.com) For now, the Norway site looks less like a dedicated OpenAI outpost and more like another node in Microsoft’s widening artificial-intelligence infrastructure network. OpenAI still has Stargate projects moving in the United States, but the Narvik capacity is now being spoken for by its biggest cloud partner. (cnbc.com) (openai.com)
