OpenAI brings Stargate to Norway with 100k GPUs

OpenAI is heading all the way toward the Arctic Circle to solve its endless hunger for power and compute.

The company announced Stargate Norway, marking its very first AI data center initiative in Europe under its OpenAI for Countries framework. The tech giant isn't building this alone. It teamed up with British infrastructure provider Nscale and Norwegian industrial conglomerate Aker, who formed a 50/50 joint venture to build and own the facility, while OpenAI signs on as an initial offtaker.

Located near the northern Norwegian town of Narvik, the site is designed to take full advantage of the region's cheap hydropower, cold climate, and existing industrial footprint.

100,000 GPUs and a $2B kickoff

The planned facility is slated to deliver 230 megawatts of capacity, with ambitions to expand by another 290 megawatts later on. Most notably, the partners are aiming to install 100,000 Nvidia GPUs at the site by the end of 2026.

According to CNBC, Nscale and Aker have each committed around $1 billion toward the initial 20-megawatt phase. The data center will run entirely on renewable electricity, relying on direct-to-chip liquid cooling to keep temperatures down while routing excess waste heat to local low-carbon enterprises.

OpenAI and Nscale clarified that Stargate Norway is completely separate from the European Union's own multibillion-dollar AI factory initiative. However, Norwegian startups and research groups will get priority access to the compute, with leftover capacity heading to customers across the UK and Northern Europe.

This buildout builds on a string of international expansions for OpenAI, including Stargate UAE earlier this year and infrastructure partnerships with the UK and Estonia.

Why it matters

We think this is a brilliant tactical play by OpenAI to navigate Europe's notoriously tricky regulatory and energy landscape.

For European developers and enterprises, it means access to top-tier GPU infrastructure on European soil. They get the horsepower needed for demanding workloads without dealing with the latency or regulatory headaches of routing proprietary data across the Atlantic.

By taking an offtaker role rather than building from scratch, OpenAI offloads billions in upfront infrastructure risk onto established European industrial and cloud partners. Securing 230 megawatts of clean, affordable power in a cool climate also sidesteps the fierce grid bottlenecks seen across Frankfurt and Dublin.

The real test will be political and operational. While the project waves the banner of European sovereign compute, local critics may still view it as an American tech giant vacuuming up pristine Nordic energy for its own proprietary systems. Delivering 100,000 top-end chips by late 2026 is also no small feat given tight global hardware supplies.