OpenAI, Sam Altman’s AI company, is expanding its Stargate project to Europe with the construction of a new data center in Norway, Bloomberg reports.
In collaboration with Nscale Global Holdings and local partner Aker ASA, OpenAI has announced that the AI facility will have an initial capacity of 230 megawatts (MW), with plans to expand this by another 290 MW. The entire project will run on renewable energy and will be owned by a joint venture between Nscale and Aker.
The growth of artificial intelligence has been driving (mainly American) companies to build data centers in Northern Europe for some time now. For example, American AI chip developer Groq recently opened its first European data center in Helsinki, Finland. This marks a step in the company’s international expansion and responds to the growing demand for fast and scalable AI inferencing in Europe.
The choice of Northern Europe is strategic: the region has a reliable infrastructure for sustainable energy, a cool climate, and complies with European data management regulations.
The plan for the data center in Narvik, in northern Norway, is OpenAI’s first project of this kind in Europe. The companies involved aim to install 100,000 Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units) there by the end of 2026, with further scaling up planned.
Close collaboration with Oracle
OpenAI launched its Stargate initiative with an announced investment of $500 billion in the United States, supported by SoftBank Group and Oracle, among others. In May, the project was expanded to the Middle East with a large-scale data center in the United Arab Emirates.
OpenAI and Oracle have been working closely together on the Stargate initiative for some time. To meet OpenAI’s requirements, Oracle is building new data centers in multiple locations in the US, including Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Wyoming, New Mexico, Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.