TL;DR
A Guardian investigation found OpenAI apparently never visited a key site for its Stargate UK data centre project before it was announced. The partnership was d in April 2026, and a previous investigation found the designated supercomputer site was a scaffolding yard with no evidence of construction.
OpenAI apparently failed to visit a key site earmarked for its Stargate UK data centre project before the initiative was announced, the Guardian reported on Friday. The revelation deepens questions about whether the UK government’s flagship AI infrastructure programme was built on press releases rather than due diligence.
Stargate UK, a partnership between OpenAI, Nvidia, and British cloud provider Nscale, was unveiled in September 2025 during Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK. The project promised up to 8,000 Nvidia GPUs deployed at sites in north-east England by Q1 2026, scalable to 31,000 over time, and sat within a broader £31 billion package of tech investments that the government presented as proof of Britain’s AI competitiveness.
The scaffolding yard
The Guardian had previously investigated the project’s physical reality in March 2026, when reporter Aisha Down visited the site of Nscale’s planned supercomputer in Loughton, Essex. She found a functioning scaffolding yard with no evidence that construction had begun on a facility that Nscale had said would be operational by the end of 2026.
Nscale announced in September 2025 that it had “confirmed” its UK investment by purchasing the Loughton site and promised 23,040 Nvidia GPUs running by early 2027. Land records at the time showed no evidence of Nscale’s ownership, with the site still registered to a different company.
The unsigned contract
The March investigation also found that the UK government had issued a press release describing a £1.9 billion investment contract with Nscale, but no such contract had been signed. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology admitted it was “not playing an active role in auditing these commitments.”
The government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, published in January 2025, cited £14 billion in private commitments to UK AI infrastructure. Those figures relied on company self-reporting rather than audited disclosures, a method the Guardian described as producing “phantom investments.”
The
OpenAI formally d Stargate UK in April 2026, citing the high cost of industrial electricity in Britain, which is roughly four times higher than in the United States, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. It also cited unresolved regulatory questions around AI and copyright.
A spokesperson said the company would “continue to explore Stargate UK” when “regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.” No planning applications had been lodged and no construction had begun at Cobalt Park, the primary Stargate UK site near Newcastle.
Where the money went instead
While Stargate UK stalled, Nscale invested €695 million in Portugal to supply 66,000 Nvidia Rubin GPUs to a Microsoft data centre campus in Sines. The company, which reached a $14.6 billion valuation in two years, found more favourable energy prices and planning conditions on the continent. Nscale’s smaller UK project with BT and Nvidia, providing up to 14 megawatts of sovereign AI capacity across three existing BT sites, is proceeding. But it is a fraction of what Stargate UK had promised, and its modest scale underlines the gap between the government’s AI ambitions and what the market is willing to build in Britain at current electricity prices.
The pattern
The UK government continued to announce large AI investment figures at London Tech Week in June 2026, including pledges from AMD and Nebius. Whether those commitments face the same scrutiny as Stargate UK remains to be seen.
The Stargate UK episode exposes a structural weakness in how the UK counts AI investment. The government tallies pledges at the announcement stage but does not verify them, creating a gap between press releases and data centres that can be measured in years, or as a separate report on the UK’s AI-climate conflict warned, may never close at all.