OpenAi, the US company led by Sam Altman and best known for ChatGpt, has announced that it has paused Stargate Uk, a major artificial intelligence infrastructure project in the United Kingdom.
WHAT HAPPENED
Stargate Uk was supposed to launch in the first quarter of 2026, with a data center – developed together with the British startup Nscale and containing thousands of specialized microchips – planned in the northeast of England. But OpenAi decided to freeze the project due to both the high energy prices in the UK and regulatory uncertainties.
More specifically, the company explained that the decision to suspend Stargate Uk was also made following the postponement of the reform of the UK copyright regulation, which would have made it easier for AI companies to use copyrighted content (such as texts or images) for training their models without having to request authorization on a case-by-case basis.
THE DAMAGE TO THE UNITED KINGDOM
The indefinite suspension of Stargate Uk – at the moment, it is unclear when or if it will be resumed – is a setback for the UK’s ambitions. Beyond the loss of an investment worth hundreds of millions of dollars, in fact, the project would have helped to give substance to the British government’s plans to make the country a global leader in artificial intelligence, also in light of the technology agreement with the United States.
THIS IS NOT OPENAI’S FIRST STEP BACK
However, this is not the first time that OpenAi has taken a step back from its initial investment plans.
The Stargate infrastructure project, presented about a year ago together with SoftBank and Oracle, involves a total expenditure of 500 billion dollars over four years. However, the details are not as numerous as one would expect for an initiative of this scale: we know broadly that the parties will invest in building new data centers and campuses dedicated to training OpenAi’s language models and processing the queries sent by users of these systems. The first Stargate facility is located in Texas, in Abilene, but OpenAi recently decided not to proceed with its expansion.
For this year, the company expects to report a net loss of 17 billion dollars, deeper than the 9 billion recorded in 2025. At the end of March, it closed a funding round of 122 billion that will be spent to “accelerate the next phase” of artificial intelligence.
