It was to be the biggest undertaking in Britain for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Stargate UK – a multibillion-pound UK datacentre project – would represent “a major step forward in the US-UK technology partnership”.
But the plans were paused in April, with an OpenAI spokesperson citing concerns over regulation and high energy costs.
Now the Guardian can reveal that OpenAI does not appear to have visited one of Stargate UK’s key sites – and that £20bn of the “potential” £30bn in investment touted by the UK government appears to have been totally hypothetical.
The findings raise questions about one of the most-hyped UK AI developments, and suggest a centrepiece of US-UK AI cooperation was in fact little more than a press release.
It follows a Guardian investigation in March, which revealed many of the deals to “mainline AI into the veins” of the British economy were “phantom investments”.
Sources with knowledge of the process to set up Stargate UK suggested the government had approached the UK firm Nscale and OpenAI shortly before Donald Trump’s visit to the UK last year, asking them to agree to develop the Stargate UK site in Cobalt Park, a business park in North Tyneside.
“They needed a big announcement,” said one.
Stargate UK was announced last year amid a flurry of high-gloss US-UK tech deals that accompanied Trump’s September visit to London. It echoed the Stargate AI project in the US, in which OpenAI promised to invest $500bn to “secure American leadership in AI”.
In comparison, Stargate UK’s ambitions were modest. OpenAI was to work with Nscale, which is building a supercomputer in Essex, and Nvidia, a maker of AI chips, to develop infrastructure at sites across Britain.
The most prominent of these sites was the planned datacentre at Cobalt Park, which the government designated as an “AI growth zone” during the US president’s visit.
A freedom of information (FoI) request returned to the Guardian shows that neither OpenAI nor Nscale ever met with the local authorities at the site in North Tyneside. Only Nvidia appears to have visited the North East combined authority, which oversaw the Stargate UK site. It did this in February 2026, five months after Trump’s visit to the UK.
“Nscale were pretty much told to back the Stargate project, and it caught them completely unaware,” said a source. “It was never really a thing. It was effectively just a government PR stunt, and [the OpenAI chief executive] Sam Altman took the hit when the plug got pulled.”
Asked if OpenAI ever visited the site, an OpenAI spokesperson referred the Guardian to a previous statement the company made when it pulled out of Stargate UK. “We see huge potential for the UK’s AI future … We continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions such…
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