Microsoft Leases 30,000 AI Chips at Narvik Site, Expanding to 82,000 Under $14bn Deal.
A Norwegian port town inside the Arctic Circle has become the sharpest picture yet of where AI infrastructure money is actually going — and who is walking away from the table.
Microsoft agreed in September 2025 to rent 30,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin chips from Nscale at a data center campus in Narvik, Norway, a five-year agreement worth an estimated $6.2 billion, the companies announced at the time. The same Narvik site had been designed and marketed weeks earlier under OpenAI's Stargate initiative. Bloomberg reported the Microsoft deal on April 14.
The Bloomberg framing was "Microsoft took over OpenAI's Norwegian data center." The reality is more specific and more revealing. OpenAI was never an investor in Stargate Norway. The project was owned by a 50/50 joint venture between Nscale, a neocloud GPU provider, and Aker, a Norwegian industrial group. OpenAI's role was limited to an optional offtake agreement — the right to buy power from the facility, not a stake in building it. Nscale and Aker each committed roughly $250 million in equity to the initial 20-megawatt phase, part of a targeted $1 billion for the first stage of a facility meant to eventually deliver 100,000 GPUs. The JV structure is on Nscale's own press release.
By the time the Narvik campus was being sold as OpenAI's Stargate entry into Europe, Microsoft had already signed a lease. The October 2025 expansion of the Microsoft-Nscale deal added approximately 52,000 more Nvidia GB300 GPUs from the same Narvik facility, bringing Microsoft's total committed capacity at the site to roughly 82,000 chips. Nscale announced the expanded partnership in October 2025, a $14 billion agreement across multiple sites that also included a 104,000-GPU hyperscale campus in Texas.
The Stargate Norway site runs on hydropower and relies on direct-to-chip liquid cooling — a technical choice that reflects the site's competitive advantage: a cold climate and cheap electricity. The facility was designed to capture and resell excess heat from the GPUs to local low-carbon industries. That is the economic pitch of Narvik in concrete terms: running AI hardware there is significantly cheaper than in warmer, more expensive markets.
That gap is why OpenAI cited UK industrial electricity costs in pausing its own $31 billion Stargate UK project on April 9. UK industrial electricity prices are more than four times those in Norway, the US, Finland, and Sweden, according to OpenAI's own filing. Three infrastructure executives left OpenAI for Meta during the same period, the Guardian reported. Andy Lawrence of the Uptime Institute said OpenAI, Nscale, and the UK government all had reasons to walk away, given rising energy prices and OpenAI's intensifying competition with rivals including Anthropic.
The pattern shows up in both Stargate projects. OpenAI attaches its brand to infrastructure proposals where it is a prospective power buyer, not a co-investor. When the economics narrow — energy costs, regulatory uncertainty, capital priorities — OpenAI steps back. Microsoft takes the hardware.
The Narvik campus is now planned for 100,000 GPUs across 230 megawatts initially, expandable to 520 megawatts. That is a substantial buildout by any measure, and it is Microsoft's buildout. The question worth watching is what happens to the Stargate brand once the infrastructure it was supposed to anchor is owned by someone else's capital.
Primary sources: Bloomberg, Nscale press releases, Microsoft source, OpenAI announcement, The Guardian / Uptime Institute