OpenAI has paused its planned Stargate AI infrastructure rollout in the U.K., citing high energy costs and regulatory uncertainty, the company confirmed to CNBC. The move puts on hold a major partnership with Nvidia and infrastructure provider Nscale that had been announced in mid‑September 2025.
The Stargate plan envisioned deploying up to 8,000 GPUs starting in Q1 2026, with the option to scale to roughly 31,000 GPUs over time. At the announcement, CEO Sam Altman framed the effort as foundational: “Everything starts with compute... Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future,” he said, promising that the work with Nvidia would enable new AI breakthroughs at scale.
Planned sites included locations such as Cobalt Park in northeast England—part of a designated “AI Growth Zone”—and the build was intended to supply local compute capacity for AI systems. But the economics of running AI-scale data centers in the U.K. quickly emerged as a hurdle. Industrial electricity for medium-sized U.K. businesses averages about 24 pence per kilowatt-hour, and large AI data centers often run continuously at 50–100 megawatts. More than 140 projects are already queued for grid connections totaling over 50 gigawatts, creating both a capacity and cost squeeze.
At today’s prices, operating a 100‑MW data center in the U.K. could cost on the order of $125 million to $250 million a year—numbers that underscore why OpenAI paused the project while it weighs long‑term viability.
Stargate U.K. followed OpenAI’s July 2025 memorandum of understanding with the U.K. government on adopting frontier AI systems in public services. It also comes after a separate U.S. Stargate infrastructure initiative announced by the Trump administration in January 2025. OpenAI told CNBC it continues to evaluate the U.K. project and “will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”
Why crypto readers should care: the pause highlights an emerging reality for compute‑intensive industries including AI and crypto—energy prices, grid capacity and regulatory clarity are decisive factors in where large infrastructure gets built. The same cost and connection bottlenecks that have shaped crypto mining geography now play a central role in AI deployment decisions, and competition for affordable, reliable power is likely to intensify as both sectors scale.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Decrypt.
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