OpenAI announces the Stargate Norway data centre

OpenAI, UK-based cloud provider Nscale and Norwegian industrial group Aker announced Stargate Norway, a data-centre project at Kvandal near Narvik in northern Norway built to house up to 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2026. It was the first Stargate site outside the United States, following the initial $500 billion US buildout announced in January and subsequent expansions with Oracle.

Nscale and Aker structured the project as a 50/50 joint venture, committing around $1 billion to the initial phase, including more than $250 million in equity, for an opening capacity of 230 megawatts with the potential to add a further 290MW on the same site. The companies said the facility would run entirely on renewable power and use direct-to-chip liquid cooling, and that the site could eventually scale up to ten times its initial size.

OpenAI said surplus capacity beyond its own needs would be made available to public and private-sector customers across the UK, the Nordics and northern Europe, positioning the site as regional infrastructure rather than dedicated solely to OpenAI’s own training and inference. The announcement extended the Stargate brand — previously a US-only, Oracle- and SoftBank-linked buildout — into a template OpenAI would repeat with further international sites later in 2025, as the company sought compute capacity and geographic diversification beyond what US-based partners alone could supply.