OpenAI eyes Canadian data centres for energy and land access

OpenAI is looking at data centre partnerships in Canada because of the energy and land available there, its head of countries George Osborne told Bloomberg at Mark Carney’s investment summit in Toronto. OpenAI paused its British project in April, saying it would proceed when regulation and the cost of energy allowed.

OpenAI is looking at data centre partnerships in Canada because of the energy and land available there, its head of countries George Osborne told Bloomberg. He was speaking at Mark Carney’s investment summit in Toronto.

Osborne was Britain’s chancellor from 2010 to 2016. In 2012 he hired Carney, then governor of the Bank of Canada, to run the Bank of England.

He joined OpenAI in December as managing director and head of OpenAI for Countries, the arm that takes the Stargate model abroad. He works from London.

Carney has articulated “one of the clearer plans for AI adoption of a western government“, Osborne said, calling the prime minister’s medium and long-term plan “very impressive“.

The summit ran on 14 and 15 September and brought about 100 of the world’s largest investment firms to Toronto. Carney wants to catalyse a trillion dollars of investment over five years.

Europe got a different answer.

OpenAI paused Stargate UK in April, saying it would move forward when regulation and the cost of energy allowed long-term infrastructure investment. The project was to run 8,000 Nvidia GPUs in the north east of England, scaling to 31,000.

British industrial electricity costs roughly four times what it does in the United States, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Grid connection requests jumped from 41 gigawatts in November 2024 to 125 gigawatts by June 2025.

The announcement did not survive much scrutiny either. OpenAI had never visited the site of its flagship British project, the Guardian found, and the government had publicised a GBP 1.9B contract that was not signed.

The copyright question is still open. A proposed text and data mining exception met opposition from the creative industries, and no law has followed.

Where OpenAI did build in Europe was Norway. Stargate Norway runs on Narvik hydropower, 230 megawatts to start, with 100,000 Nvidia GPUs targeted by the end of this year.

Energy and land, in other words. The same two things Osborne named in Toronto.

The EU is trying to buy its way past the problem, with a gigafactories call that closes to bids on 12 November and expects more than EUR 20B of private investment across up to seven sites. France’s $10B bid is already in.