OpenAI has announced plans for a European “Stargate” — the name given to a $500bn AI infrastructure project in the US — in partnership with British data centre startup Nscale.
As European businesses increasingly look to leverage AI in day to day operations, industry watchers have warned the region is ill-equipped to deal with the exponentially rising demand for compute.
The plans will see Nscale design and build an AI gigafactory — data centres made to cope with the huge processing requirements of the technology — in Norway. The startup says it will invest $1bn in the initial stages of the project. Norwegian engineering company Aker will contribute the same amount.
The project marks OpenAI’s first data centre initiative on the continent. The company said the gigafactory would deliver 230MW of initial capacity by the end of 2026.
“Europe needs more compute to realise the full potential of AI for all Europeans — from developers and researchers to startups and scientists,” 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…Stargate Norway will help provide the compute power to drive the next wave of AI breakthroughs and economic progress for Europe, in Europe.”
It’s the latest European AI infrastructure project to be announced as the region moves to bolster its compute capabilities. The UK has pledged to strip back planning regulations for AI data centres and France announced more than €100bn in data centre funding in January.
Priority access to the gigafactory’s compute will be granted to Norway’s AI ecosystem, Nscale said in a statement. Surplus capacity is expected to be made available to public and private sector users across the UK, Nordics and Northern Europe, it added.
The data centre will support 100k of the latest NVIDIA GPUs, with plans to scale in the years ahead, the companies said.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/openai-nscale-stargate-europe/
