alt.hn

4/9/2026 at 7:29:59 PM

OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape

 https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/09/openai_puts_stargate_uk_on/

by Bender

4/9/2026 at 9:14:18 PM

"It[Stargate UK] was hailed by the British government at the time as a boost for its own ambitions to make the country a world leader in AI."

How does having an AI heat farm in the UK help with that? It's still owned and controlled by a US entity. Or is "being a leader" synonymous with "being a customer?"

by krunck

4/10/2026 at 12:23:46 AM

How else do you propose selling the idea of giving a foreign company years of tax breaks in exchange for a minuscule number of jobs while slashing public budgets because there isn't enough tax revenue coming in?

by rchaud

4/9/2026 at 9:21:11 PM

No no, you see, for a government 'leading in AI' is just spending the most money on it.

by Ardon

4/9/2026 at 9:48:04 PM

For companies too, judging by the number of LinkedIn posts along the lines of

"Our 4-person team's AI bill this month was $100K and I've never been more proud of an invoice"

"If your $250K a year engineers aren't spending $250K a year in tokens, you aren't getting your money's worth"

"If you aren't using at least $500 of tokens a day, it's time for a performance improvement plan"

by hmry

4/9/2026 at 8:01:07 PM

Good, RAM to the people!

by zb3

4/9/2026 at 8:12:35 PM

Apple says: Not so fast.

by rvz

4/9/2026 at 8:04:36 PM

I don't expect prices for RAM or SSD to get cheaper anytime soon. From what I've seen, production capacity has been bought out for a couple years already.

by verdverm

4/9/2026 at 8:36:08 PM

Datacenter capex decreasing means that the chips have to go somewhere else, so it doesn't matter too much that the fab capacity has been spoken for, if the demand side is slacking prices will decrease.

by kryptiskt

4/9/2026 at 9:09:52 PM

OpenAI aren't the only ones who were increasing their datacenter capex.

by TeMPOraL

4/9/2026 at 9:13:14 PM

No, but they are the ones who placed an order for 40% of the world's supply.

by galleywest200

4/9/2026 at 9:56:24 PM

Sure, but they have competitors who'll be more than happy to pick up whatever OpenAI ultimately doesn't buy. Point being, from POV of suppliers, there's no reason to re-retool for consumer production.

by TeMPOraL

4/9/2026 at 8:21:02 PM

There was a point in time when crypto miners bought tons of capacity from TSMC months and years out and reneged on those contracts. Means nothing.

by dakolli

4/9/2026 at 8:23:29 PM

Eventually Chinese RAM will get good enough and then it'll flood the market, pushing prices down.

by logicchains

4/9/2026 at 8:37:07 PM

It has been good enough for long time. CXMT has long made DRAM and NAND modules that are just as good as anyone else's, sometimes for half the price. The only thing they can't match is flagship products of Samsung.

However because of that, prices for Chinese-made DDR5 have risen in China (and globally) along with the prices of all others, just with a slight delay.

by chmod775

4/9/2026 at 8:08:59 PM

[flagged]

by semiinfinitely

4/9/2026 at 9:06:29 PM

They have more than enough money to build an off the grid data center.

by givemeethekeys

4/9/2026 at 8:34:25 PM

Arguably this aligns with their decision to discontinue Sora.

If we assume they are trying to rapidly free up compute then the UK is a pretty stupid place to be building out new datacenters... Any project here overruns both in time and budget – if it even goes ahead at all.

Then you have energy costs which makes the UK one of the most expensive places in the world to build a datacenter. If you want to bring compute online fast and at a competitive price, then you're far better off building somewhere else in Europe like Norway.

by kypro

4/9/2026 at 9:00:44 PM

Sora was a loss-loss-leader to a loss-leader product with added liability exposure ontop. Was wise to bail on it as the resource demands are crazy for video gen with AI, and to get longer clips, you need more and more memory. Upside is, they might have some IP they can leveridge down the line, or liscence the product to others.

UK been a mess enegy wise for a while as we rushed towards netzero when we should of been more tortise, that saw the UK see where we were and where we wanted to be and go in a straight line like a roman road,but no concept of bridges or tunnels, that made the direction more bumpy than it could have been and far less impacting overall. There again, good example would be the mad rush done when they rushed to replace incadecent bulbs under Regulation EC 244/2009 with CFC bulbs chucked endless money to pat themselves on the back with LED taking over a few years later, sending those rushed replacement to landfill - which of note, if you broke one, you literly have to evac your house and air for a while due to the mecury in them. As I said, many good intentions are rushed like a hare when we all know the tortise wins the race.

by Zenst

4/9/2026 at 9:08:38 PM

Man I thought this was about the new Stargate show which they are filming in the UK. I was trying to square why OpenAI would be in charge of that.

by lucisferre

4/9/2026 at 9:58:29 PM

Hiding the stargate inside a commercial data center instead of NORAD would be a neat twist of the genre.

by TeMPOraL

4/9/2026 at 8:22:48 PM

[flagged]

by avazhi

4/9/2026 at 8:46:21 PM

> And more importantly the investors are all gone gone.

I can't even understand what this post is trying to say, considering OpenAI raised a giant new funding round mere weeks ago.

by Aurornis

4/9/2026 at 9:15:12 PM

A lot of that is compute commitments and NVIDIA has a 80% margin

by orbifold

4/9/2026 at 9:29:30 PM

Please don't break the site guidelines, no matter how you feel about $CEO. You may not owe $CEO better, you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I suppose I'd better add that yes, the rules here are the same regardless of whom you're talking about. We don't want this kind of fulmination on HN because it degrades discussion quality and evokes worse from others.

by dang

4/9/2026 at 8:30:35 PM

>And more importantly the investors are all gone gone.

they closed a $120bn funding round last week... i think i feel about the same as you towards openai, but come on.

by notatoad

4/9/2026 at 8:51:14 PM

Note that they themselves described that amount as "committed capital", not something you or I would consider "funding" if we were to raise for a typical startup.

If there are strings attached, such as "will be able to navigate red tape to get X number of DC sites approved", then the number depends on OpenAI's ability to execute.

by tadfisher

4/9/2026 at 8:51:41 PM

I know the world is moving awfully fast these days, but SBF was only two and a half years ago.

by nonameiguess

4/9/2026 at 8:50:15 PM

> Not sure I’ve ever seen a real life business man go from boyking god emperor to clearly incompetent scam artist quite like Mr Altman

Elon Musk?!

by phyrex

4/9/2026 at 9:24:26 PM

The guy that almost destroyed PayPal because he was obsessed with re-writing their entire stack for Windows instead of addressing fraud?

by BoggleOhYeah

4/9/2026 at 10:04:38 PM

lucky UK

by PunchyHamster

4/9/2026 at 9:10:28 PM

Elon called it when this was announced. Sam never had the money. Interesting to contrast those two characters.

I think Sam is somewhat sociopathic, smooth salesman, not very technical, will say whatever needs to be said to get what he wants.

Elon is on the spectrum and has bad social judgement and is just immature in a lot of ways, is very direct and means what he says when he says it, even if it's often unrealistic or misguided. Is extremely technical, and honestly I think has better intentions, just gets in his own way a lot.

Dario is an odd duck but seems stable and good intentions, very technical (I think?).

Hasib, wow what a normal, likable guy, extremely technical.

Zuckerberg seems to finally be entering the chat in terms of big AI models.

I think Altman scares me the most, in terms of having control of this tech. Hasib probably seems the best to control it. Just in terms of if I had to pick one.

by Rover222

4/9/2026 at 10:25:04 PM

It feels very weird to read that Musk has "better intentions". Better intentions than Altman, or than all the stuff he is saying and doing?

by lumiukko

4/10/2026 at 9:37:58 AM

I’m talking about intrinsic motivation, regardless of if you agree/disagree with the politics. Altman wants power for the sake of power. He’s not technical. I think Musk’s power seeking is to achieve technical goals.

by Rover222

4/9/2026 at 9:28:01 PM

tl;dr - "Which turd is more polished?"

by jjulius

4/9/2026 at 9:00:17 PM

[dead]

by johnwhitman

4/9/2026 at 8:05:26 PM

I wonder if Claude will get the deal in the next few months. It's what everyone is asking for, brand is much stronger.

by verdverm