{"id":389907,"date":"2026-04-09T13:45:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T13:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/389907\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T13:45:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T13:45:08","slug":"openai-pulls-out-of-landmark-31bn-uk-investment-package-openai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/389907\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI pulls out of landmark \u00a331bn UK investment package | OpenAI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">OpenAI has put plans for a landmark project to strengthen the UK\u2019s AI capabilities on hold, citing high energy costs and regulation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Stargate UK was a part of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2025\/sep\/17\/what-is-new-uk-us-tech-deal-ai-supercomputers-investment-economy\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">landmark UK-US AI deal announced last September<\/a>, in which US companies appeared to commit \u00a331bn to the UK\u2019s tech sector, part of a larger series of investments intended to \u201cmainline AI\u201d into the British economy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">A Guardian investigation last month <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2026\/mar\/09\/revealed-uks-multibillion-ai-drive-is-built-on-phantom-investments\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">revealed<\/a> many of these were \u201cphantom investments\u201d and a supercomputer scheduled to go live in 2026 was this March still a scaffolding yard in Essex. That supercomputer was to be built by Nscale, a UK firm that had never built a datacentre before but said it was aiming to deliver the project in 2027. Nscale was also to build key datacentres for Stargate UK.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">The Stargate project was to support Britain in building out \u201csovereign compute\u201d \u2013 infrastructure that would allow the government and other UK institutions to run AI models on datacentres in the country. This is in theory important to the security of British data, for both institutions and individuals.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">An OpenAI spokesperson said: \u201cWe see huge potential for the UK\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">OpenAI\u2019s exact commitments, under the Stargate project, were always vague. It was announced in September, during Donald Trump\u2019s visit to the UK, and came as the Labour government sought to make AI and datacentres central to economic growth plans.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">High energy costs, rising further because of the US-Israel war on Iran, stand to delay or derail AI datacentre projects worldwide. The UK\u2019s industrial electricity prices were already the highest in Europe before the start of the war.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-130mj7b\">Nscale has been approached for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI has put plans for a landmark project to strengthen the UK\u2019s AI capabilities on hold, citing high&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389908,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-389907","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}