Microsoft leases Norway Stargate capacity
Microsoft has agreed to rent data‑centre capacity in Norway that was originally marketed as part of the Stargate sites tied to OpenAI, effectively taking over a key facility after OpenAI paused plans there. Reporting says similar transfers are happening elsewhere—Google has also rented capacity at a UK site that OpenAI had stepped back from—highlighting hyperscalers absorbing previously announced frontier AI builds. ( )
Microsoft has agreed to lease computing capacity at a Norway data-center site that OpenAI had promoted as part of Stargate, after OpenAI stepped back from renting it directly. (bloomberg.com, cnbc.com) The site is in Narvik, inside the Arctic Circle, and Microsoft will rent 30,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin chips from cloud provider Nscale, adding to a prior $6.2 billion Microsoft commitment at the same campus. (bloomberg.com, datacenterdynamics.com) OpenAI had introduced “Stargate Norway” on July 31, 2025 as its first Europe data-center initiative, saying the Narvik project was planned for 230 megawatts, with an ambition to expand by another 290 megawatts and reach 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units by the end of 2026. (openai.com) A data center is the warehouse where artificial intelligence systems run, and the graphics processing unit chips inside it do the heavy math that trains and serves models. In this case, the building plan remains, but the tenant using part of that capacity has changed. (openai.com, cnbc.com) OpenAI told CNBC it had abandoned plans to rent the Norway compute directly and was discussing renting that compute from Microsoft instead. That would leave Microsoft between OpenAI and the hardware at a site OpenAI had once presented as part of its own infrastructure push. (cnbc.com) The Norway switch came less than a week after OpenAI paused its Stargate project in the United Kingdom. Bloomberg and CNBC reported that OpenAI cited energy costs in the United Kingdom, and CNBC also reported regulatory concerns there. (bloomberg.com, cnbc.com) Reporting on April 15 said Google had also agreed to take capacity at an Nscale site in West London. DatacenterDynamics reported that the London facility was separate from the United Kingdom sites OpenAI had previously planned to lease, but the pattern still showed other hyperscalers moving into Nscale capacity as OpenAI retrenched in Europe. (datacenterdynamics.com, techrepublic.com) That is a sharp contrast with OpenAI’s January 21, 2025 launch of Stargate in the United States, when it said the venture intended to invest $500 billion over four years and begin deploying $100 billion immediately. OpenAI later said its United States build-out with Oracle and SoftBank was still on track and had expanded to multiple sites. (openai.com, openai.com, openai.com) For Microsoft, the Norway lease secures more advanced Nvidia capacity in a market where power, land, and chip supply are all constrained. For OpenAI, the move leaves the Narvik project alive as infrastructure, but no longer as a direct OpenAI tenancy on the terms it announced last summer. (bloomberg.com, openai.com, cnbc.com)
