Meanwhile, OpenAI hired George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor, to lead its international expansion.
However, in the US, talks over OpenAI’s data centre programme have progressed slowly with investors, including key backer SoftBank.
A plan to expand the capacity of a key site in Texas, which is still in development with US data giant Oracle, was also dropped earlier this year, according to Bloomberg.
While tech giants have revealed plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars this year on data centres to meet demand for AI apps, many of their projects are facing delays.
Up to 50pc of large data centres have fallen behind schedule, according to an analysis by Sightline Climate, held up by planning problems or energy constraints.
The Telegraph reported last week that Nscale, a $15bn data centre business, which features the former UK deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg on its board, had been forced to push back its timelines for another project in Loughton, Essex.
Tom Hegarty, a spokesman for the campaign group Foxglove, which has lobbied against a surge in data centre developments because of their climate impact, said: “Sam Altman’s flagship Stargate UK project exists as little more than a colourful eight-month-old press release.”
A government spokesman said: “Our focus is on creating the right conditions for investment in the UK’s AI and data centre infrastructure, and we are working with OpenAI and other leading AI companies to strengthen UK compute capacity.”
OpenAI and Nscale declined to comment.
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