Stargate UK (Cobalt Park) data center, England, United Kingdom

Stargate UK, the data center that OpenAI, Nvidia and the British firm Nscale said they would develop at Cobalt Park, a business park in North Tyneside in the north east of England, United Kingdom, has been on hold since April 2026, when OpenAI paused the project citing regulation and energy costs. "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," an OpenAI spokesperson said.

OpenAI announced its Cobalt Park plan in September 2025, as part of a £31 billion government package that made the North East an AI growth zone. Nscale said at the time that OpenAI would explore offtake of up to 8,000 Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units) in the first quarter of 2026, with the potential to scale to 31,000 GPUs over time, across several UK sites of which only Cobalt Park was named.

Cobalt Park already holds about 35 megawatts of data center capacity, but Computer Weekly reported in April 2026 that no planning applications had been lodged and no construction was underway for new capacity there. A Guardian investigation in July 2026, based on freedom of information requests, found that neither OpenAI nor Nscale had met the local authorities at the North Tyneside site; only Nvidia met the North East Combined Authority, in February 2026. A request to the National Energy System Operator suggested the site had no grid connection and had instead submitted an alternative way to power itself, the Guardian reported.

"There's just not the infrastructure there to be able to actually support it," said John Johnsson, leader of the Conservatives in North Tyneside. "It's now looking highly unlikely whether the project is going to come to North Tyneside." The government told the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption that £20 billion of the growth zone's touted £30 billion was the sum the site would need to use its 1.1 gigawatt power supply, not investment already committed.

The rest of the North East growth zone is moving. Northumberland Council signed off reserved matters in December 2025 for the first phase of the 6 million square foot QTS campus at Cambois, on the former Blyth Power Station site, financed by Blackstone's Renaissance Land, and QTS said it would install piling for the first building in spring 2026. Plans for two further buildings there have been lodged, and Wansbeck Regeneration has applied for a facility of almost 4 million square feet less than two miles away.

Whether Stargate UK returns is up to OpenAI, which says it will move forward only when regulation and energy costs allow. A government-backed taskforce co-chaired by the technology secretary and North East mayor Kim McGuinness says the wider growth zone will still reach 1.1 gigawatts of power, with over 400 megawatts of capacity coming online in 2028.