OpenAI Abandons Stargate Sites
OpenAI pulled out of a second European 'Stargate' datacentre deal in Norway after halting a UK project, and reports say Microsoft will take capacity at the Norwegian site originally earmarked for OpenAI. Coverage frames the moves as OpenAI leaning more on its Azure partnership rather than building its own regional branded compute footprint. (networkworld.com) (enterpriseai.economictimes.indiatimes.com)
OpenAI has pulled out of its Stargate data center deal in Norway, the second European retreat for the company in eight days. (cnbc.com) Microsoft will take the Narvik, Norway capacity instead, renting 30,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin chips from Nscale at a campus inside the Arctic Circle. Nscale said the new contract adds to Microsoft’s earlier $6.2 billion commitment at the same site. (bloomberg.com) OpenAI had introduced Stargate Norway on July 31, 2025 with Nscale and Aker as a 100,000-GPU project powered by renewable energy, calling it its first AI data center initiative in Europe. OpenAI said at the time it would be the site’s “initial offtaker,” meaning the first major customer for the computing capacity. (openai.com) The Norway reversal follows OpenAI’s April 9 decision to pause Stargate UK, a project it announced on September 16, 2025 with Nvidia and Nscale. CNBC reported that OpenAI cited energy costs and regulatory concerns in the UK pause. (cnbc.com) Stargate is OpenAI’s umbrella name for securing the data centers and chips needed to train and run artificial intelligence systems. OpenAI’s original U.S. Stargate project, announced in January 2025 with SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, said it aimed to invest $500 billion over four years. (openai.com) The European pullbacks leave OpenAI leaning more heavily on Microsoft’s cloud instead of taking branded capacity at regional sites itself. CNBC reported that OpenAI is now discussing renting compute from Microsoft, even as Microsoft absorbs the Norway capacity OpenAI had once lined up. (cnbc.com) Nscale’s own September 2025 UK announcement had already tied Microsoft to the same buildout, saying the company was helping back up to 58,640 Nvidia GPUs in Britain. That overlap made the UK and Norway projects less like stand-alone OpenAI outposts and more like shared infrastructure from the start. (nscale.com) Network World said analysts see the shift as a more conservative spending posture as OpenAI moves toward a possible public listing. OpenAI had not publicly announced a Norway cancellation before Microsoft’s replacement deal surfaced. (networkworld.com) For Norway, the site still moves ahead, but under a different customer mix. For OpenAI, the latest change leaves the Stargate name on the project’s history, not on the capacity now being filled. (datacenterdynamics.com)
