“We continue to explore Stargate U.K. and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. The company added that it “sees huge potential for the U.K.’s AI future” and is continuing to invest in talent and expand its local presence.
Unveiled last September, the project called for deploying as many as 8,000 GPUs through a partnership involving AI cloud company Nscale and Nvidia $NVDA. Cobalt Park — located within one of England’s newly designated AI Growth Zones in the North East — was among the planned locations for the distributed infrastructure buildout. Longer-term ambitions called for expanding to 31,000 GPUs, enough to run OpenAI’s models locally for demanding applications in finance, national security, and other heavily regulated sectors. When contacted for comment, Nscale offered no response; as of the time of reporting, Nvidia had also not provided a statement, according to CNBC. According to CNBC, a source with direct knowledge of the situation said the two companies have not stopped talking about what comes next for the project.
Among major economies, the U.K. carries some of the steepest industrial electricity costs anywhere globally. Slow and difficult connections to the national grid have further complicated efforts to build out AI infrastructure across the country. On the regulatory side, the U.K. government has been working through a contentious copyright framework for AI, with the majority of respondents to a public consultation rejecting a broad exception that would have allowed AI companies to train on copyrighted works without compensation, according to a government report published in March.
“The U.K. has an incredible depth of talent and a strong track record in AI,” Phoebe Thacker, London site lead at OpenAI, said in a statement. “London is already a key hub for our research and teams, and this new office gives us the space to keep building here.”
The Stargate project carried significant symbolic weight as a pillar of Britain’s AI ambitions, having been unveiled in the wake of a Memorandum of Understanding that OpenAI and the U.K. government signed in July 2025. Positioning the country as a world-leading destination for artificial intelligence has been a stated government priority, underpinned by the AI Opportunities Action Plan that took effect at the beginning of 2025.
