Grand plans for a British data centre tied to OpenAI's Stargate project may have been more announcement than substance, according to a report by Aisha Down in The Guardian.
In 2025, UK ministers and OpenAI publicly promoted plans for a roughly £20bn site at Cobalt, in England's north-east. That figure represented the bulk of a headline £30bn in "potential" AI investment that officials touted at the time.
But The Guardian reports that this investment now appears to have been largely hypothetical. According to the story, a source described the widely publicised plans as a "PR stunt."
The report points to concrete gaps between the promotion and any real-world activity. It says OpenAI and Nscale — the infrastructure firm linked to the effort — never visited the Cobalt site and did not lodge the planning forms that a major construction project would typically require.
The framing matters because governments increasingly compete to attract AI infrastructure, and big dollar figures help sell the idea that a country is winning that race. Data centres are capital-intensive and slow to build, so the absence of site visits or planning applications is a signal that firm commitments may not have existed behind the numbers.
The Guardian's account raises a broader question about how such headline investment figures are generated and vetted before officials repeat them publicly.
Why it matters: when the eye-catching investment totals politicians attach to the AI boom turn out to be aspirational rather than committed, it becomes harder for the public to judge which announced projects will actually get built.