OpenAI’s Head of Countries Says Canada Has the Energy and Land for Data Centres
George Osborne, former Chancellor of Britain and hiring manager of Mark Carney (who ran the Bank of England), now OpenAI’s Head of Countries, has told Bloomberg at Mark Carney’s investment summit in Toronto that Canada is a potential location for data centre partnerships due to its abundance of energy and land.
Osborne made these comments while discussing the "one of the clearer plans for AI adoption" put forth by the Canadian government. He noted the prime minister’s medium and long-term plan for AI as very impressive.
The summit, held on September 14th and 15th, brought together approximately 100 major global investment firms. Carney aims to catalyse $1 trillion in investment over five years.
However, OpenAI paused its British data centre project in April, citing high energy costs and regulatory hurdles. The proposed project would have used 8,000 Nvidia GPUs, scaling up to 31,000.
British industrial electricity is significantly more expensive than in the US, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, with grid connection requests increasing dramatically over the past year.
OpenAI’s Norwegian data centre, Stargate Norway, powered by Narvik hydropower, offers a different scenario. The facility will initially run on 230 megawatts, with plans to expand to 100,000 Nvidia GPUs later this year.
As Osborne emphasized in Toronto, energy and land are key factors for OpenAI’s future data centre decisions – the same factors he identified as crucial for Canada.
The EU is also actively pursuing a solution through its gigafactories initiative, expecting over €20 billion in private investment across up to seven sites.