The $500B Stargate data center development joint venture led by OpenAI and SoftBank is considering building data centers outside of the United States, with the UK emerging as the most likely target for international expansion.
Stargate’s leadership is in early discussions about the possibility of expanding the AI data center initiative’s footprint into Europe in the coming years, the Financial Times reports, citing sources involved in the project. While the UK is the favorite to land the JV’s first international investment, Germany and France are also reportedly considered strong candidates.
“We want to go where the compute is,” a Stargate official told the FT.
Officially unveiled at an Oval Office press conference by President Donald Trump in January, Stargate purports to be a record investment in AI data center infrastructure in the U.S.
The firms behind the effort, which include Oracle and United Arab Emirates sovereign tech fund MGX, have pledged to spend close to $100B developing new data centers over the next year and $500B over the next four years — although some reports, along with competitor Elon Musk, have cast doubt on the feasibility of those numbers.
Build-out on the first Stargate data centers began last year in Abilene, Texas, a site already controlled by Oracle that the firm says will contain 10 individual data centers. No other U.S. development sites have been announced.
In a joint statement following the FT’s report, OpenAI and SoftBank told Reuters that Stargate still intends to spend $500B in the U.S. over the next four years and that UK data centers or any other European expansion will only occur after those projects have been completed.
The UK has reportedly drawn interest from Stargate’s backers in part because of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for data center investment and government efforts to help data centers access the massive amounts of electricity such facilities require.
The UK data center market has become a growing target among institutional investors, but urgent questions have emerged about how the UK can modernize and expand its grid system to keep pace with demand and ensure it rivals other European markets. Tech giants like Microsoft and Google have warned that infrastructure shortcomings limit the country’s future competitiveness in the AI space.
“The UK is in a seriously dangerous position,” Knight Frank Global Head of Data Centres Stephen Beard told Bisnow in March. “There is a political objective to become an AI superpower, but the challenge is our archaic grid network and how we’re asking an organization like National Grid to act in an entrepreneurial way, yet it can’t guarantee power to new sites until 2034.”
In an effort to address such barriers to data center development, last year the UK classified data centers as “critical national infrastructure,” a designation that allows the home secretary to override local opposition to data center projects. Government officials have proactively identified potential sites for data center development in former industrial hubs, while several large-scale projects have received planning permission over the past year.
The UK remains Europe’s largest data center market, according to S&P Global, with nearly 80% of the country’s data center inventory clustered in and around London in areas like Slough and the Docklands. As of 2024, the greater London market had close to 1.5 gigawatts of data center inventory either in operation or in development, according to research firm BMI.
