OpenAI and Nscale reportedly never visited the Stargate UK site before announcing it

OpenAI and its UK cloud partner Nscale apparently never visited the site earmarked for their flagship Stargate UK data centre before announcing the project in September 2025. That finding, from a freedom-of-information investigation published July 4, calls into question the credibility of the ceremony that launched it.

Stargate UK was unveiled during Donald Trump’s UK state visit in September 2025, folded into a touted 31 billion pound tech-investment package. The FOI request, sent to the North East combined authority, reportedly showed that neither OpenAI nor Nscale ever met local officials at the North Tyneside location. Only chipmaker Nvidia is said to have visited, in February 2026, five months after the announcement.

A reporter who went to the designated site in March 2026 reportedly found a working scaffolding yard with no sign construction had begun, and land records that still listed a different company, not Nscale, as the registered owner. UK government press materials cited a prospective 1.9 billion pound investment contract that had not been signed.

The original plan promised up to 8,000 Nvidia graphics processing units by the first quarter of 2026, scaling to 31,000. OpenAI formally paused Stargate UK in April 2026, citing UK industrial electricity costs it said run roughly four times those in the United States, Finland, Norway and Sweden, alongside unresolved AI and copyright rules. Asked about the site, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed back to the company’s April pause statement: “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 as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”

Nscale said its chief commercial officer had gone to North Tyneside but did not confirm meeting anyone; no record of a meeting exists. Nscale has since committed 695 million euros to a Portugal project supplying 66,000 Nvidia Rubin GPUs to Microsoft.