The prestigious data center project “Stargate UK” is coming under further pressure. As the British daily newspaper The Guardian reports, OpenAI representatives apparently never visited one of the central sites intended for the construction of the planned AI infrastructure. Even though the British government had already advertised a potential investment volume of up to 20 billion British pounds.
The background is an announcement from September 2025: At that time, OpenAI announced Stargate UK in a blog post as an AI infrastructure partnership with Nvidia and the British data center operator Nscale. According to its own statement, the goal was to strengthen the “sovereign computing capacities of the United Kingdom,” i.e., the country’s ability to train and operate large AI models in its own data center. The intention was to rent up to 8,000 Nvidia GPUs from Nscale by the first quarter of 2026, and in the long term, it was planned to reach up to 31,000 of these computing accelerators. Cobalt Park, a technology park in Northern England, was to be the key location for this. However, a “freedom of information request” by The Guardian has now revealed: Neither OpenAI nor Nscale were ever on site. Only a delegation from Nvidia viewed the premises.
20 billion purely hypothetical pounds
The calculation didn’t add up. In April 2026, OpenAI paused the project – officially due to high energy costs and regulatory uncertainty. An OpenAI spokesperson explained: “We continue to evaluate Stargate UK and will proceed with development once the conditions – such as regulatory requirements and energy costs – enable long-term infrastructure investments.”
It is remarkable how hypothetical the mentioned sums apparently were from the beginning. According to a Guardian report, part of the 20 billion pounds advertised by the British government is more of a “potential” figure and was never a binding commitment.
The 20 billion pounds in question were part of an investment project with a total volume of 30 billion pounds. The US-British pact was intended to drive progress in areas such as drug development or green energy and create thousands of jobs. The remaining 10 billion comes from the US investment company Blackstone. According to The Guardian, this company is indeed implementing a planned data center in Blyth, UK.
The whole thing fits into Stargate, which US President Donald Trump announced in January 2025 as a new AI infrastructure alliance – supported by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX, a state fund of the United Arab Emirates. The target volume: up to 500 billion US dollars for data centers and power generation, with an initial financing of around 100 billion US dollars. Whether Stargate UK will ever be realized on the advertised scale remains to be seen for now.
(nen)
