North Tyneside
North-East England borough; location of Cobalt Park, where OpenAI paused its planned UK Stargate data centre.
North Tyneside's Cobalt Park lost one of its three flagship tenants on 23 April 2026, when OpenAI paused the UK Stargate data centre it had planned there, blaming Britain's regulatory climate and its energy costs; Blackstone and Nscale kept building.
Last refreshed: 4 August 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Why did OpenAI pause its UK Stargate site in North Tyneside while Blackstone continued nearby?
Timeline for North Tyneside
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Data Centres: Boom and BacklashOpenAI pauses Cobalt Park Stargate site
Data Centres: Boom and BacklashBackground
North Tyneside is a metropolitan borough in North-East England, home to the Cobalt Park technology campus. The borough's post-industrial economy, built on manufacturing and services after post-war industrial decline, made Cobalt Park's emergence as an AI Growth Zone site a significant economic development opportunity.
Cobalt Park sits within a wider North-East England data centre cluster that also includes Blackstone's Blyth campus, part of the UK Government's AI Growth Zone policy. The zone's pitch rests on land and grid capacity that undercuts London and the South East, though North Tyneside's own connection queue remains subject to the same national bottleneck affecting the rest of Britain.
The borough's exposure to a single hyperscaler's investment decision, OpenAI's, illustrates the risk in siting strategies built around AI Growth Zone status: National Grid and regulatory conditions can pause a flagship project regardless of local planning consent already granted.
One Cobalt Park tenant pulls out
Cobalt Park became the first Stargate site anywhere outside the United States to lose a tenant over regulation, when OpenAI walked away from its planned campus there on 23 April. The withdrawal landed the same week Britain's grid-connection queue for data centres alone topped the country's own 45 GW peak demand, and just days before OpenAI quantified the complaint: industrial power in the UK running at more than four times US and Nordic prices.
The pause was part of a wider retrenchment rather than a North Tyneside-specific verdict: OpenAI told investors on 28 April it was cutting its global compute target from $1.4 trillion to roughly $600bn through 2030, also dropping a Texas lease and pausing Norway plans. Blackstone's separate £10bn Blyth commitment, in the same North-East England cluster, was unaffected.