Stargate Norway | Hacker News Reader

Stargate Norway

openai.com

105 pointsamrrs118 comments

”While in Norway, OpenAI will also engage with government officials to explore opportunities for collaboration, including boosting AI adoption and helping to deliver on Norway’s sovereign AI goals for the benefit of its people.”

Aka, Snowden thought us nothing.

Norwegians beware of ChatGPT used as a weapon to move oil money from the people to the ”future of business ”.

Worked in Norway for six years in a research lab (50% private | 50% public).

First thing I noticed when I arrived: they are using Google for emails, sharing documents, drives, meetings, research projects, etc. The loss of sovereignty that this represents AND the major risk for leaks/theft is MAD.

It was a research lab entirely focused on tech/CS/computational science So it's not like they don't know stuff about technology.

Years prior to this, I'm in Finland in a tiny lab in Turku/Åbo (the city has two names, one in Finnish the other in Swedish.

I remember there was a dude doing his master's trying to integrate a bunch of devices (phone, desktop, laptop, cloud, etc.) so that basically your AI assistant can automatically handle stuff. This implied A LOT of constant (or almost constant) data collection.

During one of the meeting, I think I'm the one who asked: "But wait, isn't this a massive issue in terms of privacy?" The big boss of the lab, replied: "Oh I know you're from France, and you guyz care a lot about this. But here we simply do not"

Conclusion:

I haven't looked at sociological studies trying to build an historical overview of the Nordic people and their relation to electronic privacy. But my experience goes so much against the idea I had about Nordic "culture" (this word means nothing here: Finnish and Norwegian are VERY different societies, but bear with me).

I really believed that in those countries I'd find some high priority, super secured, home made, safe solutions for handling messaging, data, research -> it is REALLY NOT THE CASE, I haven't seen ANY OF THAT; they're all using USA made cloud-(AI)-tech.

The Nordic countries act as if they were an extension of the Angloamerican culture for some reason. They sure would object to their data being used by China or Russia for example, but American companies doing it doesnt pose a problem. But France has its own national identity, and it does not see itself as the extension of Angloamerica. So its natural that Angloamerican corporations having unfettered access to its data would be a no no.

Maybe the nordic countries just have very similar value to the anglosphere and therefore they trust each other? That doesn't mean one is an extension of the other.

It’s not specific to those countries. In France for example, major companies store their data (including research) on Microsoft or Google servers.

For modern collaboration tools you don’t have that many options.

Yep, AI sovereignty shouldn't mean handing over control to foreign entities with better PR teams

Isn't Norway a key NATO member and huge buyer of F35 jets and other key US tech? What should Norway do? Buy Chinese and Russian instead?

Europe produces no military jets, tanks, and other equipment?

Europe is not NATO?

Most European nations are also NATO nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO#/media/F...

Exactly.

Europe is not US.

What happened to Europe?

What's the European alternative to the things OpenAI puts in their datacenters?

What's the European alternative to Nvidia H100s and Quantum InfiniBand, AMD Epycs and Instincs, and Intel Xeons?

In the past you had European companies like ST, Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens who could design cutting edge compute and networking chips of the time, but those days are long gone, with European companies have missed out on the hyperscale race being relucted to making commodity low margin products, so they either have to buy American or Chinese if they want cutting edge.

[deleted]

What do they have to do with Europe?

You're right. I read the other day in a comment that they're headquartered in France, but never verified.

It was my mistake.

Seems like the EU has decided to pull away from the US. As has Canada and frankly, a lot of the rest of the world.

Pulling away by investing billions in the US economy and buying more US products and services?

You have a weird definition of pulling away.

If you review the stipulations of the "deals" and read any of the analysis, these are stop-gaps.

New production commitments, military commitments, pulling away from US big tech.

No matter what happens, the damage has been done. It's picking up momentum seemingly every day.

And they seem more than happy to take our scientific researchers.

>pulling away from US big tech

Stock price says otherwise. Probably because replacing MS Office with Libre Office doesn't really mean much while still running your digital infrastructure on US services, US chips and US phones. Lemme know when EU creates its own You Tube.

>And they seem more than happy to take our scientific researchers.

Who's taking who's researchers? Got any examples. From what I saw Linus Torvalds is still in US.

> Lemme know when EU creates its own You Tube.

March 15, 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dailymotion

> Who's taking who's researchers? Got any examples. From what I saw Linus Torvalds is still in US.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00938-y

I wouldn't call Linus a "scientific researcher". He's an engineer, and that's also a group that economies need, but he's not a scientist, and not a researcher.

Unfortunately for the "engineering" part: https://archive.ph/xChye

>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00938-y

I can only read the title due to paywall, but that doesn't answer the question that I made to your comment that someone is stealing someone else's researchers. I asked for hard examples of researchers being stolen that back up your point.

>He's an engineer, and that's also a group that economies need

And why is he and the rest like him in the US and not in Europe?

> I asked for hard examples of researchers being stolen that back up your point.

"Stolen" is a far cry from "taken". Researchers are not property, they have free will. And in this case, it's "taken" in the sense of "taken on" or "taken in", because the USA is actively cutting science and research budgets.

So, you want what, a dozen names of people you've likely never heard of because most researchers are not celebrities?

Or you could ask Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, the vice dean of research and graduate education at UW Medicine, who said "We’re going to have a big brain drain in the U.S. of these really talented folks, … It’s not just a switch that you flip, right? If people move out into another direction with their careers, they often don’t come back." - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/one-countrys-lead...

There's some pseudonymous examples here, too: https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2025-03-27/us-scient...

> And why is he and the rest like him in the US and not in Europe?

Why did he go to the USA in the first place? Because of the different world in 1997 when he graduated.

Why is he still there? Everyone's different, but I can say that the older you get, more ties you have. After Brexit, I was free to move to Germany, but my brother, a decade older and with a family, couldn't even though he was interested.

"Nature also analyzed its jobs board and found “that US scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad between January and March 2025 than during the same period in 2024.”

"Scientists who have felt abandoned in the U.S. are being courted by institutions across the world. Aix-Marseille University (AMU), located in France, "introduced eight U.S.-based researchers who were in the final stage of joining the institution's 'Safe Place for Science' program, which aims to woo researchers who have experienced or fear funding cuts under the Trump administration," said Politico. The program has received close to 300 applications from some of the top institutions in the U.S."

Source: https://theweek.com/science/scientists-refugees-research-tru...

"There are also new scientific refugees in the making. Trump's "big, beautiful bill" calls for a 56% cut to the National Science Foundation budget and a 73% reduction in staff and fellowships. It also cuts resources from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and U.S. Geological Service. There is a "whole generation of young scientists who see no pathway into the field for them,""

https://www.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/comments/1ked2hy/which_cou...

I assume many who work at OpenAI have seen Pantheon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)

I assume people at OpenAI take inspiration from dystopian SciFi (like 'Her')

I wouldn't call Her dystopian per se, as it's more an individual story instead of applying to a society as a whole. Dunno what a sequel would look like though.

And also, it's no longer science fiction; there's people having relationships with chatbots which can easily be made to do voice transcription / synthesis, and r/characterai melts down whenever they have an outage.

I wouldn't characterize "Her" as dystopian at all. The future shown in the film is, quite frankly, probably in the top quintile of outcomes we can hope for when it comes to AI. The only truly horrifying thing it depicts is the return of high waisted pants in men's fashion

This isn't limited to OpenAI, Silicon Valley as a whole behaves like that (see Zuck wanting to make the metaverse a reality)

This show had an interesting concept for copying a brain (lasering a brain off layer by layer like reverse 3D printing)

That was my first thought as well. Sounds like a cool name for a black site.

Huh. I guess I'm old now, but my first thought was obviously the interstellar transportation device with a big honkin' rotary dial to select your destination.

ᐰ

A serpent guard, a Horus guard and a Setesh guard meet on a neutral planet.

It is a tense moment.

The serpent guard's eyes glow.

The Horus guard's beak glistens.

The Setesh guard's nose drips.

I miss those Jaffa jokes.

In Norway, we call them Å.

Star riddle. (Stargåte)

Got my chevron locked

Indeed

North Norwegians will finally experience higher electricity prices like us in the south experience since a few years.

On the plus side, a ton of electricity generation capacity is being built for AI datacenters. If this is a bubble and it pops, electricity prices are going to fall faster than you've ever seen before.

Norway is currently building very little new power generation at all, unfortunately. NIMBYism is blocking onshore wind, ecological concerns blocking hydro. This has already started hurting, and is projected to get worse. Before taking any AI datacenters into account.

Electricity prices have a pretty hard bottom that additional supply can't lower. At least where I live distribution is more often the bottle neck than supply.

Same for me, I pay more for distribution fees per month than the kWh generated.

Even if it pops, I think the cat is already out of the bag.

About LLMs: Maybe there won't be much training going around as model we might starting to hit diminishing returns with the current model architectures/approaches, but I believe inference is here to stay. Scaffolding code, trivial functions, ... are things that LLMs excel at doing and once you get used to offload those to the LLM it is really hard to get back to doing it manually.

About Image/Video generations: Here I believe there is even more to explore and I consider this separate from LLMs in the context of AI winters/bubbles. Especially regarding the video generation part.

I am not in the field, but I believe the appeal of being able to create movies without needing xM$ for actors' salaries is huge. And if you can even replace the VFX also with Video Generation then it is a 3 birds with one stone scenario (You pay for AI compute and you replace actors, VFX specialists, and compute costs for render farms).

So, I believe that there is not a scenario in which electricity prices plummet as you describe. Maybe locally around datacenters that were primarily built for LLMs training, but not globally.

> scaffolding code, trivial functions, ... are things that LLMs excel at doing and once you get used to offload those to the LLM it is really hard to get back to doing it manually.

True, but local models cover that use-case very well already and consume little power doing so.

That is a fair point. Honestly, for programmers/technical people I believe you are right and it is trivial already to get started. However for non technical people I believe it is just easier to open claude/gemini/openai web interfaces and chat away. Especially if they have already great integrations (say Google Drive) out of the box.

No, the infrastructure cost would have been paid already and will be recouped on the remaining consumers.

Increasing demand is the only reason anyone every developed more supply. And the future will obviously need more energy production. Development costs money so consumers will pay for it with higher prices but Norway just got new, large consumer to help foot the bill.

I would not hold my breath, Norway is kinda holding back new supply (wind + solar + nuclear) if you compare it to Finland or Sweden.

In the past few decades, data centers have been placed with latency in mind - ie. Typically you don't want to be more than 1000 miles from users.

However, in the world of AI, latency is already 1 second plus, so the economics change - you do better to build where there is cheap electricity and free cooling.

I forsee Iceland as a good place to invest.

Iceland is a small country, so it'll depend on what power infrastructure is already there, too much power consumption will overload the grid - unless they build new power plants and other infra.

Almost all countries have taxes and regulations on electricity (grid maintenance isn't free!), however at AI datacenter scale it makes sense to build the power plant on the same site as the datacenter, therefore avoiding those electricity taxes.

So wherever you build, you'll most likely be building the same wattage of power station as you do datacenter.

Lots of other resources can be shared too - for example shared cooling systems

Power is why you would build in Iceland. There is a lot of geothermic potential there. It's after all, the land of hot springs and volcanoes. So if you need more power, build a new geothermic power plant.

Historically they had so much "cheap" energy that they built aluminium smelting plants.

That's why places like Norway, Iceland, and even parts of Canada are starting to look like prime real estate

Bits of Russia too, if you can smuggle the requests and responses in and out.

Remember Russia has huge quantities of free gas which used to be sold to the EU but is right now wasted.

>Remember Russia has huge quantities of free gas which used to be sold to the EU but is right now wasted

It isn't "WASTED", what re you on about.

Russia has no east-west gas pipeline. That means gas extracted in the west of Russia, which was previously sold to Europe, is now in excess and has nowhere to go. Currently it is flared off.

News article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62652133

That was August 2022. What are the odds it's the same after 3 years?

If this doesn't require chevrons to lock and connect to remote gate through a wormhole, they can't call it Stargate. That's just lying otherwise

I would also accept an obelisk orbiting Jupiter

Yeah a stargate must be something that gives the humanity new superpowers, like exploring other planets in distant parts of the galaxy, not yet another AI slop factory.

I do not understand why they chose Norway. I would choose a country where it is easy to build up a new power plant quickly with solar and wind, close to the site of the data center. Maybe they just have too much electricity up there that is not needed by the population or existing industry?

A big reason to not do it lower down in europe is also just that it's naturally very cold in northern norway so you already save on energy that would be needed to cool it. Meta has datacenters at around the same latitude but in sweden for the same reason.

I've imagined for a long time that eventually we'll shift the bulk of our heavy computation closer to the poles, and use those data centers to power our society. You either use solar power and shift the computation from north pole to south pole seasonally depending on which place is in eternal sunshine, or, since these places are so far away from major population centers, you could just plop down a bunch of giant nuclear reactors without too much resistance.

You might even be able to sell some of that heat to a local heat network to supply other businesses and homes.

Indeed the article explicitly says they intend to do so.

It'll be a bit less cold in northern norway with this thing - accelerating ice cap melt and sea level rise.

Doomsday cult.

All of modern life does that. AI could also bring some solutions instead of just perpetuating problems. And on a cost per intelligence token basis it's obscenely cheap anyway.

Maybe it's time we rethink modern life instead of using it as an excuse to worsen things?

I understand why they didn’t choose Germany: they didn’t want to buy the GPUs in cash and send the receipts via Fax.

And as a reward you pay one of the highest electricity costs in Europe.

this is so hilariously true

> Maybe they just have too much electricity up there that is not needed by the population or existing industry?

Yes, this is basically the case. It's quite expensive to transfer power across several degrees of latitude, and as a result, the price of power in the south of Norway is sometimes orders of magnitude higher than in the north.

Maybe solar and wind aren't viable as they might seem, and/or, Norway isn't as populous as people would think. Total population is just 5.5m, which is the scale of an average US state or a major city in Asia. Workload would be smaller than typical mental image of "a gigantic AI datacenter that serves everyone in a country".

Northern Norway has lot of cheap and stable hydro capacity. The prices there for baseload power are cheap. Interesting part of that market is that they lack internal north-south transfer capacity. So much that Finland which has relatively more north-south capacity has cheaper electricity at same latitude than in Norway...

Norway has a good amount of power generation, and most notably, excellent hydro storage, meaning it has a good spread of cheaper power, rather than peaks and valleys of high and low cost like the UK has (which has lots of wind, but little storage).

https://euenergy.live

2 €/MWh today

Well, for one they have a lot of money and would be a good customer for a government AI

It could be that solar and wind is not a good way to power the datacenter.

Geothermal is a big deal in Norway as well.

We have about 99% hydro power, Iceland is the geothermal county.

But there is also plenty of oil to run the backup generators...

Hydro is quite stable. I don’t think Norway is burning oil for power. Natural gas would be better but still, probably not required.

>230MW

rather small compared to what was advertised previously

>joint venture between Nscale and Aker

which seems to imply it is not The Stargate (Oracle, Softbank, MGX?)

Norwegian news seem to think this is a semiconductor manufacturing plant.

They probably did a direct translation of this:

«Stargate Norway is planned to deliver 230MW of capacity, with ambitions to expand by an additional 290MW. The facility will target to deliver 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by the end of 2026, with the intention to expand significantly in the years ahead.»

Makes it sound both like a power plant and a semiconductor factory..

Norway's public and largest news network, "NRK," made a straight-up mistake and wrote that it would produce AI chips. They later corrected it. But obviously, the journalist had no idea how big news that would be if Norway were able to host a TSMC-style factory.

They have since corrected it tho: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/aker-har-signert-milliardavtale-...

Wow by “deliver” they mean “slurp up”, no? That’s some enthusiastic greenwashing right there!

lloooool

> The facility will target to deliver 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by the end of 2026, with the intention to expand significantly in the years ahead.

This is massive. As a point of comparison: Denmark just unveiled a new supercomputer recently which has only ~1,500 GPUs [1]

[1] https://novonordiskfonden.dk/en/news/denmarks-first-ai-super...

If those are a100 GPUs, then we are looking at 21.6GWh of electricity in a month at full power at 300W. At 0.16 cents per kW that 3.456M euros per month for the GPUs alone.

According to Wikipedia, in 2021 Norway produced 157.1TWh of electricity, that's 13.1TWh per month. The GPUs will consume less than 1% of the total electricity production capacity Norway has (or had in 2021).

Norway currently uses fully or close to 100% renewables, according to electricitymap. Hopefully this investment won't turn that around.

Norway doesn't want Stargate. Go away

Just bend the knee to your new Goa'uld overlords.

This is being done in partnership with a company called NScale. They once sued a friend of mine over software he wrote, and lost.

I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, but if you’re going to play those kinds of games and still lose, that’s not the kind of partner I’d trust.

Some skepticism about the viability of the project here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/#butwhat-about-stargat...

I thought it was pretty universally known that the project doesn't have and won't have sufficient funding?

And also that the vast majority of things Sam says are a lie?

I mean, when multiple countries are signing on, I think it’s gonna be fine

> I mean, when multiple countries are signing on, I think it’s gonna be fine

So? They're not paying for it, are they?

From what I can tell in the link I posted (and this could be wrong, so corrections welcome):

1. The project needs ~$100b (although a fraction of that will be sufficient to get the first deployment online)

2. OpenAI and Softbank have each committed ~$18b

3. OpenAI is trying to raise ~$40b to stay in business

4. The majority of that ~$40b is coming from Softbank

5. Softbank has ~$30b cash on hand and is syndicating at least ~$10b in investment for the OpenAI raise.

6. OpenAI has projected a burn rate of ~$40b/year by 2028.

To me it looks like Software is committing $30b to OpenAI + $18b to Stargate. OpenAI, if the raise is successful, will receive $40b over a period of time of which $22b will be available to OpenAI if they make good on their commitment of $18b for Stargate.

Which means that OpenAI needs, in the next few years, $40b/year to run, but will only have $22b after they meet the Stargate commitment in the coming year, leaving them short of operational cash and requiring a further round of investments.

Interesting mix of geopolitics, green energy, and AI arms race vibes here

"Stargate" in the name really sounds like OpenAI has lost touch with reality.

(Didn't they at some point also say they wanted to build their own semiconductor fabs? That went in the same direction).

I think they wanted others to build semiconductor labs for them for free, because... I don't know, "we're OpenAI" or so...

I would like to remind everyone that the Stargate Norway project does not, in fact, possess a Stargate.

So another major bidder for electricity in my area comes online. Not looking forward to the invoices next winter…

Anyone needing context on this: Norway's electrical infrastructure is almost too good since citizen's prices are set in competition with exporting to the UK, and mainland Europe.

Probably will reap the rewards in about 10 years time once the UK is producing huge amounts of wind and Europe solar, but that's not nuch of a consolation for the minute.

What rewards would north Norway reap when they pay 2 euro/mwh right now?

Not so much North Norway, but certainly south Norway who currently pay taxes that build north Norway's infrastructure, but have to compete on price with the UK and Europe.

Same issue happening in the US right now too. Datacenters are gobbling up electricity and pushing prices ever higher.

Tariffs will make it even worse, with prices the utilities have to pay for infrastructure shooting higher.

I've heard the limiting factor right now for some DCs is the lack of electrical equipment(transformers, cabling, etc).

I just got up here and love that my electricity costs 1/10th what it did in the states.

The AI winter will be extra cold this year.

Personally, as a Norwegian, I am really hopeful for this. I hope the "Not in my backyard" sentiment won't block this project, as it has so many times here. Narvik will be a great place. Lots of renewable energy, a history of industry, and a cool North Atlantic climate for cooling it all.

Though I am starting to recognize in myself that I think AI is so cool, that I might be a bit naive. But I just love it so much, use it so much, and have a childish pleasure in it, that I'm starting to think that I need to curb my enthusiasm.

I do note that the other side of the spectrum has no problem with representation, though. With just as unnuanced attitudes like: AI is evil, useless, capitalistic exploitation, and so on. So the pessistic view is more than enough represented in the public discourse. So maybe I can just let myself be in love with this tech.

Great, my electricity bill will be going up. :-(

Think they stole this one from the anime series Pantheon.

The name is very powerful

Have we as a species considered that the very last thing we need given our climate crisis and already near-apocalyptic state (fires, floods, storms - it's biblical!), is some risky tech bro vanity project gamble eating up the rest of our resources and accelerating the death of our species?

That maybe the attempt of capital to finally replace pesky labor with cheap machines isn't worth risking it all?

No? Guess it's time to scream into the void some more.

> That maybe the attempt of capital to finally replace pesky labor with cheap machines isn't worth risking it all?

Who's gonna purchase the goods if noone gets a salary? That will work out like the french revolution.

You don't need to tell me, I agree, though I think the Bolshevik revolution is a more likely model.

Capital was never known for its foresight. The planning horizon is quarterly results

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