OpenAI ditches UK Stargate datacentre

“We see huge potential for the UK’s AI future,” says OpenAI, “AI compute is foundational to that goal — we continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”

Stargate is the $500 billion datacentre building project announced in September in the White House  (pictured)with President Trump, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Softbank’s Masa Son and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Elon Musk said at the time they didn’t have the money for it. Oracle has since shelved an expansion planned for the Abilene, Texas main hub because of funding issues.

There have been reports that OpenAI is no longer interested in building datacentres and will rent datacentre capacity instead.

OpenAI’s UK Stargate datacentre was to have been built by Nscale the ‘Neocloud’ startup builder of datacentres which has ex-Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg on the board.

Neocloud companies build datacentres hoping to make money from them  by selling computing capacity.