230-MW Stargate Norway AI Project Unites OpenAI, Nvidia and Hydropower

A massive artificial intelligence infrastructure plant in Norway will seek to interconnect AI, manufacturing and renewable energy within the next year.

The partnership to create Stargate Norway unites some of the biggest names across the sectors, including OpenAI, Aker, NScale and chip maker NVIDIA. Building Stargate Norway in the Narvik region will position it close to abundant hydropower resources and relatively low competitive electricity demand to keep prices relatively low.

It also will be American-based OpenAI’s first data center initiative in Europe.

"Europe needs more compute to realize the full potential of AI for all Europeans — from developers and researchers to startups and scientists — and we want to help make that happen," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in a statement. "I've always said we'd love to bring Stargate to Europe if the conditions are right, and we think we've found that in Narvik with clean, affordable energy, ideal climate, and great partners in Nscale and Aker. Stargate Norway will help provide the compute power to drive the next wave of AI breakthroughs and economic progress for Europe, in Europe."

Staggering numbers in computing and power generation

The partners say Stargate Norway will soon generate 230 MW of AI-enabled data capacity—eventually aiming for 520 MW—and be completely powered by renewable energy in the region. The computing power will be enabled by 100,000 NVIDIA graphic processing units by 2026, according to reports.

Global AI infrastructure firm Nscale will design and build Stargate Norway, while the center will be owned equally by Nscale and Norwegian investment firm Aker in a planned joint venture. Both NScale and Aker so far have contributed $1 billion each to the early 20-MW phase of the project.

“Delivering one of the first European AI Gigafactory to market is a strategic milestone for the region and boosts its role in the global AI landscape," said Josh Payne, CEO of Nscale. "Sovereign, scalable and sustainable infrastructure is now essential to remain competitive. We're proud to partner with Aker, drawing on the team's extensive experience and impressive track record, to deliver a new generation of AI economic and productivity growth in Europe. Together, we are combining OpenAI's leading models with Nscale's vertically integrated AI cloud, to provide the sustainable infrastructure necessary to support public benefit, build industrial resilience and enable long-term regional innovation."

The American Stargate AI Initiative

While creating a strong network of AI data centers in the western world is a priority in Europe, In the U.S., President Trump and business leaders also are pushing there to create infrastructure expanding AI capacity and leading the technology globally. Earlier this year, President Trump announced a U.S.-based “Stargate Project” with OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX as lead investors in the initial $100 billion initiative which is expected to reach $500 billion.

The energy demand is enormous to feed these processing units and training models in action, and the president has vowed to make emergency declarations to spur more baseload-level power whether it’s natural gas or nuclear.

“We have to get this stuff built. They have to produce a lot of electricity, and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily,” Trump said as quoted in Scientific American.

Last month, the Trump Administration’s Department of Energy announced it was inviting private sector partnerships to connect AI capacity and power generation on four federal land locations. Those sites include Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky and Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

"By leveraging DOE land assets for the deployment of AI and energy infrastructure, we are taking a bold step to accelerate the next Manhattan Project—ensuring U.S. AI and energy leadership,” Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy, referring to the scientific collaboration which developed the first atomic bomb during World War II, said when the DOE federal land project was announced last month. “These sites are uniquely positioned to host data centers as well as power generation to bolster grid reliability, strengthen our national security, and reduce energy costs.”

Back to Norway and the Global Rise of the Industrial Compute Age

Stargate Norway, led by OpenAI’s technology, is designed to spearhead AI-enabled technology advances in Europe, but also collaborate with local and regional academic institutions to advance AI research and development in northern Norway.

NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU architecture for AI. Image credit NVIDIA

"Norway has a proud history of turning clean, renewable energy into industrial value, powering global industries like aluminium and fertiliser," said Øyvind Eriksen, President & CEO of Aker. "Today, artificial intelligence and advanced data operations represent the next wave of value creation. Northern Norway, with its surplus of clean energy, available capacity, and industrial readiness, is the ideal launchpad for this transformation. As data centers shift from cost centers to value-generating assets, Norway's energy advantage becomes a catalyst for the next generation of digital industry."

The race to lead in AI—a technology which promises untold computing power—is considered critical in many nations, including China. In an earlier EnergyTech story, Everett Thompson, a longtime data center and real estate development player and founder and CEO of WiredRE, said the world is entering a new “Industrial Compute Age,” as he called it, and the criticality of succeeding at AI was unprecedented.

“Enterprise data centers are going away, and everybody is using the cloud; it’s a very fascinating time,” Thompson said. “There will be some swings and misses, but no question the genie is out of the bottle and we’re in an Industrial Compute Age.

“It’s hard to imagine that’s going to stop,” he added. “Quantum computing is coming faster than people expected, and it could be a wonderful stairstep, changing the relationship between computing and power in a positive way.”

Big data, Big Money

Digital infrastructure’s leading firms are putting money where they believe the future is. Google is investing close to $75 billion on AI infrastructure alone, while Apple plans to spend $500 billion on manufacturing AI capacity and data centers in the U.S. before the end of this decade.

OpenAi creates AI technology such as the GPT family of large language training models. Microsoft, which is signing numerous power purchase agreements to expand nuclear power generation in the U.S. to help meet data center demand, is a key investor in OpenAI with about $13 billion.

OpenAI was founded 10 years ago by Altman, Elon Musk as co-chairs with others in the founding group. “Deep learning” AI, of which OpenAI is intensely involved, is a part of machine learning which operates within multilayered artificial neural networks to extract and process deeply embedded classification, regression and representation learning models.

(Editor's note: EnergyTech.com focuses purely on the energy journey by the world's commercial, industrial and mission-critical large-scale customers. Increasingly, the rise in AI demand has resulted in many stories around collaborations between digital and power infrastructure firms. Below we include a few of those stories).