OpenAI's Territory Has Been Taken Over by Microsoft, the Gate Project Is Slowly Changing

A hidden struggle over computing power resources is reshaping the AI infrastructure landscape.

According to Bloomberg, Microsoft has reached an agreement with Norwegian cloud service provider Nscale to rent 30,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin chip computing resources located in the Narvik campus within the Arctic Circle. This campus was originally intended for OpenAI and was once prominently promoted as a key component of the "Norwegian Star Gate" project—an initiative that corresponded with OpenAI's plan to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States. In the end, the land remained the same, but the tenant changed.

OpenAI confirmed that it had indeed discussed this campus with Nscale, but ultimately failed to reach an agreement. Meanwhile, OpenAI also announced last week that it had paused its similar Star Gate project in the UK due to high energy costs and strict regulations. The computing power freed up by this UK project was quickly taken over by Google—Alphabet will rent data center resources from Nscale in western London, which are equipped with NVIDIA Grace Blackwell chips.

On one hand, OpenAI is stepping back, while on the other hand, Microsoft and Google are quickly filling the gap—a situation that is quite thought-provoking.

More importantly, OpenAI is quietly scaling back its digital efforts. In February of this year, OpenAI disclosed to investors that its infrastructure investment would be approximately $60 billion by 2030—this number is significantly lower than the previously announced long-term commitment of $140 billion. After making a grand announcement, facing continuously rising server construction costs, this AI giant clearly seems to be slowing down.

Microsoft, however, is taking another direction—accelerating expansion. In addition to this new deal in Norway, Microsoft also took over a Texas project that was originally developed for OpenAI and Oracle last month, and this week it announced that it will purchase 3,200 acres of land in Wyoming to expand its data centers. Wall Street predicts that Microsoft's capital expenditure this year will reach $143 billion, mainly used for data center construction.