OpenAI announced on 31 July 2025 that it will establish a data centre in Norway as part of the Stargate infrastructure initiative [source]. The facility, termed "Stargate Norway," represents the company's first European deployment under the Stargate programme, which was initially announced for US-based infrastructure earlier in 2025.

The Norwegian site will host AI training and inference workloads, with OpenAI citing the country's renewable energy grid and regulatory environment as factors in the decision. The announcement did not specify capacity targets or operational timelines beyond a projected 2026 construction start.

Stargate Norway follows OpenAI's pattern of expanding compute infrastructure to meet demand for GPT-4 and successor models. The company has previously acknowledged capacity constraints affecting API availability and response times, particularly during peak usage periods in late 2024.

The Norwegian government confirmed it had engaged with OpenAI on data sovereignty and energy consumption terms, though details of any agreements were not disclosed in the announcement. Norway's data protection authority, Datatilsynet, has not yet issued public guidance on the deployment.

This marks OpenAI's second announced international data centre project, following a partnership with a UAE-based entity in 2024. The company operates primary infrastructure in the United States through Microsoft Azure, which remains its principal cloud provider.

The announcement comes as European regulators continue to scrutinise AI providers under the EU AI Act, which entered provisional application in August 2024. OpenAI has not clarified whether Stargate Norway will process EU user data or serve primarily as training infrastructure.