A Guardian investigation found roughly £20bn of the 'Stargate UK' investment was effectively hypothetical, and neither OpenAI nor its partner ever met the local planning authority.
When OpenAI and the UK government announced a £30bn UK datacentre project as the centrepiece of US-UK AI cooperation during Donald Trump's September 2025 visit, the deal made headlines worldwide. A Guardian Freedom of Information investigation published this week found that OpenAI does not appear to have visited the project's flagship North Tyneside site, and that roughly £20bn of the investment was, in the paper's phrasing, "totally hypothetical" from the start.
The finding reframes Stargate UK, the project name borrowed from OpenAI's separate $500bn US Stargate initiative, from a delayed datacentre build into a diplomatic announcement with no operational counterpart. The Guardian's FoI request to the North East combined authority, the local body overseeing the Cobalt Park site designated as an "AI growth zone" during Trump's visit, returned a record of zero meetings with OpenAI or its UK partner Nscale. The only company that did engage with the authority was Nvidia, which visited in February 2026, five months after the announcement.
That gap, on the institutional record, is the load-bearing detail. It is also a specific, reproducible test any reader can apply to the next government-touted AI deal: did the company ever sit down with the local planning authority?
OpenAI framed the project as a step toward bringing its infrastructure to British soil. The deal, the company said, would make the UK "OpenAI's largest AI infrastructure deployment in Europe" through work with Nscale and Nvidia across multiple British sites. The UK government described the announcement as part of a record-breaking £150bn package unveiled during the state visit. Stargate UK was the marquee item.
Plans were paused in April, with an OpenAI spokesperson citing concerns over UK regulation and high energy costs. The Guardian's reporting adds a different explanation. Sources with knowledge of the project's setup told the paper that the UK government approached Nscale and OpenAI shortly before Trump's visit, asking them to agree to develop the Cobalt Park site. "They needed a big announcement," one source said. "Nscale were pretty much told to back the Stargate project, and it caught them completely unaware," said another. "It was effectively just a government PR stunt, and [the OpenAI chief executive] Sam Altman took the hit when the plug got pulled."
The mechanism behind the deal is structural. The July investigation follows the Guardian's March reporting on UK AI "phantom investments," a category of headline-grabbing deals that produced little follow-through. Stargate UK, on the FoI record, fits the pattern: an announcement timed to a state visit, a designated growth zone, a partner firm told to back the project, and no recorded engagement with the local authority the deal was nominally meant to benefit.
What changes the reading of the April pause is not that OpenAI walked away from the UK, but that the UK appears to have walked into the announcement first. OpenAI's stated reason for stepping back, regulation and energy costs, is real. The FoI record suggests there was less to walk away from than the September 2025 headlines implied.
The template is now being applied to other jurisdictions. When the next government announces a multibillion AI partnership alongside a state visit, the local paper trail is the test. The North East combined authority's FoI response is what an institutional no-visit looks like.