Good morning and a very warm welcome to everyone joining us here today. I'm Christina Schartum, Head of Communications at Aker , and it is my pleasure to be your host for this announcement event. What you've just seen is the opening video from Narvik, Northern Norway. It is just a glimpse of the scale and ambition behind Stargate Norway, a project that will deliver sovereign-grade AI infrastructure powered entirely by renewable energy. It also marks OpenAI's first AI gigafactory investment in Europe, and we'll hear more about that from Sam Altman shortly. Today is also the official launch of a strategic 50/50 joint venture between Aker and Nscale, and the signing of a significant partnership with OpenAI. Together, we are committing to secure, scalable, and energy-efficient infrastructure. Infrastructure that is expected to generate activity, support capability development, and drive long-term innovation in Northern Norway.
Over the next 20 minutes, we'll hear from leaders at Aker , Nscale, OpenAI, and NVIDIA. Early next week, the Aker team will be in Narvik to meet with the local community and stakeholders. To officially kick us off, I am delighted to welcome our CEO at Aker , Øyvind Eriksen, to share his vision behind this partnership and what it means for the industry, for AI innovation, and for Northern Norway. Øyvind, over to you.
Good morning, everyone. It's a privilege to be here today to mark the launch of Stargate Norway, a project that represents not only a bold step forward for artificial intelligence in Europe, but also a natural evolution of Norway's industrial legacy. For centuries, Norway has transformed clean, renewable energy into global industrial value. From aluminum to fertilizer, we have built industries that have powered economies and created jobs, all rooted in our access to abundant hydropower and a deep commitment to sustainability. Today, we stand at the threshold of a new era, one where data, not raw materials, is the most valuable resource. Where compute capacity, not kilowatts alone, defines competitiveness, and where artificial intelligence and AI infrastructure are reshaping every single sector, from energy and healthcare to finance and manufacturing. Stargate Norway is our response to this transformation.
Together with OpenAI and Nscale, we are building a sovereign, scalable, and sustainable AI infrastructure in Northern Norway, a region rich in clean energy, industrial readiness, and long-term potential. Let me say a few words about our partner, Nscale. Nscale is a young company, but with extraordinary momentum. What makes them a strong partner for Aker is not just their technical capabilities, but their clarity in purpose. They are focused, fast-moving, and deeply committed to building sovereign-grade infrastructure that aligns with European values. Where Aker brings industrial experience, a track record in building companies, local presence, and project execution capabilities, Nscale brings agility, technical depth, and a singular focus on AI infrastructure. Together, we are stronger, and together, we are delivering something that neither of us could have achieved alone. With OpenAI, we are proud to welcome one of the world's most advanced AI research organizations to Norway.
Their decision to make Stargate Norway the first AI gigafactory investment in Europe is a strong vote of confidence in our energy advantage, our regulatory stability, and our ability to deliver. This project will create activity and jobs, attract talent, and strengthen Norway's position in the global AI landscape. More than that, it will ensure that the benefits of AI, the productivity, the innovation, the breakthroughs are developed and deployed in a way which reflects European values: openness, security, and democratic access. We are proud to be a part of this effort, and we look forward to working with our partners, our communities, and our stakeholders to bring Stargate Norway to life. Thank you very much to OpenAI and Nscale and our local partners for this unique opportunity for Aker and for Norway.
Thank you, Eivind, for setting the tone and vision for what this partnership represents. Now, I'd like to welcome the CEO of Nscale, Josh Payne, to share his perspective as the joint venture partner responsible for designing, building, and operating the Stargate Norway site. Josh, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Christina, and thank you, Eivind, for your thoughtful opening remarks and for Aker's partnership and leadership in bringing this project to life. I'm Josh Payne, Founder and CEO of Nscale, Europe's AI hyperscaler. We are Europe's fully vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering AI software and infrastructure services for large-scale training, fine-tuning, and inference workloads. I'm delighted to be here to announce Stargate Norway, one of the largest AI infrastructure projects in Europe and the first AI gigafactory in the region from our partner, OpenAI. As the inaugural site under the OpenAI for Countries program, today marks a milestone for the next chapter of European AI infrastructure. Across Europe and around the world, leaders understand that AI is no longer just a frontier technology. It is becoming the backbone of economic competition, scientific progress, and public service delivery. Ambition alone isn't enough.
Real leadership in AI requires deep capability, from physical infrastructure to compute and platform tools needed to build and deploy frontier systems. Without it, strategy remains theory. The foundation of tomorrow's economy will rest on access to high-performance, scalable, and sustainable AI infrastructure. The regions that invest in this capability today will be the ones that shape innovation, productivity, and economic growth in the years ahead. With Stargate Norway, we are helping to lay that foundation for a more resilient and inclusive AI future across all of Europe. With this project, we're delivering that foundation with scale. Sustainability and sovereignty are also at its core. The Stargate Norway facility will be engineered to deliver an initial 230 megawatts of capacity, hosting 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs.
It is purpose-built for the most demanding training and inference workloads, running entirely on renewable power, using closed-loop liquid cooling, and recycling waste heat to support local industries. These are not just add-ons, they're central to our design philosophy. At Nscale, we believe in building with long-term sustainability in mind. Our aim is for Stargate Norway to become a longstanding pillar of AI adoption in Europe, enabling growth and innovation across all sectors without taking its toll on the environment. Norway is central to this and a natural fit for laying the foundation for the European AI ecosystem. It's long been part of Nscale's footprint, with our first facility already in the Arctic Circle in a town called Glomfjord.
With Stargate Norway, we're extending that value to governments, enterprises, startups, and researchers across the continent, providing sovereign, sustainable, and high-performance compute that fuels the next wave of AI growth and innovation. On behalf of Nscale, I'm proud to strengthen Europe's capacity to lead in AI on its own terms. None of this happens alone. with Aker, we have not only found a partner that is an industrial powerhouse, but also a Norwegian national champion. We're proud to partner with them, drawing on Aker's extensive industrial project delivery experience and impressive national track record to deliver a new generation of AI growth across the European continent. Together with OpenAI's world-leading models and NVIDIA's powerful GPUs, we will provide the AI infrastructure foundation that Europe needs to lead in AI. It's an honor to stand alongside our partners as we bring this project to life. Stargate Norway.
Thank you, Josh, for underlining what a strategic milestone this is for Europe and the importance of sovereign, scalable, and sustainable infrastructure for a future-ready society. To bring a global perspective on the transformative role of AI, we are now pleased to share a message from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
I'm sorry I can't be there in person to mark this major moment for our companies, for Narvik, and for the future of AI in Europe. Today, we're proud to announce Stargate Norway, OpenAI's first AI data center initiative in Europe and the next major deployment of OpenAI for Countries. Infrastructure like this is really important. It unlocks a ton of potential for developers, researchers, scientists, and startups all across Norway and Europe. We've seen how quickly people are adopting AI when they realize how useful it can be. In Norway, for example, the number of weekly ChatGPT users has quadrupled in the past year. Most users are under 35. These are no longer only tools for tech companies or tech people. They're now tools for learning, building, and creating that everyone uses.
We want to make sure that people here have the best possible infrastructure to keep going right at home. This project reflects a big bet on Europe, on sustainable infrastructure, and on partnership rooted in shared values. We're working with two incredible companies: Nscale, with expertise in building high-performance AI solutions at scale, and Aker, with its longstanding experience in energy, infrastructure, and industrial innovation. When we started OpenAI almost nine years ago now, we believed that AI could become the most impactful technology in human history. We didn't know exactly how we were going to get there, but we believed it was possible and that if we succeeded, we wanted to make sure that it benefited everyone. At the time, very few people believed in AGI. We kept learning by doing. We had some breakthroughs. We had some setbacks. We got lucky in some places.
We got unlucky in some places. In the way that technology moves forward, we now are in a place where everyone can see this tremendous impact that AI is having, is going to have in the future. Now we're starting to look ahead to superintelligence. Even more than before, our focus must be on wide and fair access. This is a technology that will reshape the global economy and really the whole way we live our lives. It's critical that superintelligence becomes cheap, broadly available, and not that concentrated with any one person, company, or country. We, not just OpenAI, but the whole industry, we are building something profound. This is a kind of brain for the world. It'll be personal, adaptable. It'll be easy to use. It'll give people incredible superpowers that were sort of science fiction only a couple of years ago.
The limit won't be the algorithms and the research, but it'll increasingly become the physical instantiation that it takes to make this work: chips, cables, servers, energy, everything that you need to power this brain. The more of it, the better. Stargate Norway offers more of that potential right here in Europe. It will contribute to the overall compute power needed to drive the next wave of AI breakthroughs and deployment and economic progress for Europe. I'm incredibly excited about what this will create for the future. Thank you.
Thank you, Sam, for that powerful message and for highlighting why the future of AI depends on bold global collaboration. This new facility will support 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs initially, so it's only fitting that we now hear from another pioneer shaping the future of technology, Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA.
Congratulations to everyone gathered in Oslo today and to Prime Minister Støre and the government of Norway on this important milestone. The launch of Stargate Norway marks a new chapter for AI infrastructure in Europe. We're entering a new industrial era. Just as electricity and the internet became foundational to modern life, AI will become essential infrastructure. Every country will build it. Every industry will depend on it. AI is no longer hand-coded. It is trained. It is refined with massive compute. It is deployed into factories, research labs, and digital services. Stargate Norway will be powered by GB300 superchips and connected with NVLink network technology. It is designed to scale to hundreds of thousands of GPUs and support the most advanced models in training, reasoning, and real-time inference. Congratulations to Nscale and to Josh Payne and the teams who helped make this possible.
Congratulations to Sam and OpenAI on being part of this important first for the region. We're proud to support this effort. Tusen takk.
A sincere thank you to our speakers today and to everyone who joined us from around the world. Today's announcement brought together voices from business, industry, and technology, all aligned around a shared ambition: to build infrastructure that is bold, lasting, and rooted in purpose. Operations are targeted to begin in the first half of next year, and we look forward to sharing more as this joint venture moves from vision to reality. Thank you for being part of this moment. We look forward to continuing the conversation.