Inside the AI Boom's Arctic Outpost

Standing atop a skeleton of reinforced steel, Torkjell Lund surveys his domain.

To the east and west, snow-covered peaks loom over this vast Norwegian valley. To the south, a fjord deposits icy water into the Atlantic Ocean. Above, the northern lights have been known to grace the Arctic sky. But Lund is pointing to the scene below: a sprawling building site of blasted black rock and half-built metal structures. 

This gigantic data-center complex is being built by the British startup Nscale for use by Microsoft and its customer, OpenAI. Data centers are the engines of the AI revolution: cavernous, power-hungry buildings, filled with thousands of high-octane computer chips. The race for AI dominance has led to a stampede of data-center construction across the planet, from the plains of Texas to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. More than 800 data centers are currently under construction worldwide, on every continent except Antarctica. Together they will annually consume roughly the same amount of electricity as the nation of Malaysia. The world’s biggest tech companies are set to spend some $7 trillion on data centers by 2030, according to the consulting group McKinsey. It is one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in history.

Perhaps no data center’s location is as unexpected as this one. The small Norwegian municipality of Narvik is an old Viking port high above the Arctic Circle, shrouded in frigid darkness for much of the winter because of the earth’s axial tilt. In March, TIME was granted an exclusive tour of the site, which is one of the biggest AI data-center projects in Europe, as well as the northernmost in the world. “You picked one of the worst days this year to come,” says Lund, the site’s manager. For months, the biggest nuisance has been snow. Giant piles flecked with gravel sit unmelted as reminders of one of the coldest winters in recent memory. But today, with the temperature hovering just above freezing, the problem is rain.

The weather hasn’t stopped the construction, though. Above us, a workman hooked onto a steel gantry drills loudly. Lund splashes over to a place where he can better be heard, passing two men attempting to sweep accumulating rainwater toward a drain. Behind

him, another worker in fluorescent overalls directs a crane operator who is lowering a steel column into place. Around 350 workers are on site today, but that number is expected to rise to at least 1,500 in the coming months as the build accelerates. “I’ve been project manager for a lot of construction projects in Norway,” Lund shouts. “But this doesn’t compare to anything.”

What might on its face seem like one of the most inconvenient places for a data center is actually one of the best, according to Nscale. Northern Norway has an abundance of surplus energy. Vast dams dot the mountainous landscape, supplying nearby hydropower plants with plentiful water, the gravitational energy of which is harvested for cheap electricity. This region has roughly a spare gigawatt of unused power, according to the company that runs the Norwegian grid—roughly enough to power a small city. Nscale has secured electricity in Norway at 3¢ to 4¢ per unit—far less than the European average of 10¢. The cold climate is a bonus. Chips run hot, so the less energy required to cool them, the better. 

This data center above the Arctic Circle is partially a product of machinations in Silicon Valley and Washington. In January 2025, President Trump appeared alongside OpenAI CEO Sam -Altman at the White House and announced “Project Stargate”—an up to $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, Softbank, and others to build a network of data centers. OpenAI has since said it hopes to build data centers totaling roughly six times the annual energy consumption of New York City by 2030. 

The Nscale data center in Narvik was initially named Stargate Norway and slated to become the first European outpost of the project. But in April, Nscale jettisoned the Stargate branding. OpenAI had dragged its feet on signing a formal contract with Nscale even after announcing the project publicly, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. As a result, Nscale announced Microsoft would step in to take OpenAI’s place. An OpenAI spokesperson said OpenAI would still rent capacity in the data center as a customer of Microsoft. Doing so would fall under existing contracts and thus make more financial sense, they said. OpenAI also pulled out of Stargate U.K. and canceled a planned expansion of its flagship facility in Abilene, Texas. With OpenAI expected to file for an IPO, analysts say the company may be attempting to show financial discipline. “The optionality helps them,” says Alvin Nguyen, a senior analyst at Forrester, a global research firm. 

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The demand for computing power is so fierce that OpenAI’s departure barely mattered to Nscale, which has quickly become one of Europe’s hottest startups, valued at $14.6 billion. Known as a “neocloud,” so called because it is built primarily for the needs of new AI models, it is part of an emergent category of tech companies that have risen up to satiate the market’s ravenous hunger for AI computing power. Nscale is barely two years old, but business is booming, with five data centers in various stages of construction in the U.S., U.K., and Norway. Investors are lining up in advance of a possible IPO later this year. In March Nscale raised $2 billion, the largest round of its kind in European history. Josh Payne, the company’s 32-year-old CEO, tells TIME he wants to turn Nscale into a “$1 trillion hyperscaler”—a new cloud company that can compete with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Far from trying to freeze out this potential threat, large tech companies are eager to partner with Payne and Nscale. The company’s rapid rise is a sign of the generational fortunes that are being minted in the AI gold rush—and the risks many see in being left on the sidelines. “I’ve never seen a startup take off like that before,” Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang said last September, just after he invested $683 million in Nscale.

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Nscale’s rapid ascent has also raised questions. The company spun out of a heavily indebted crypto-mining venture in 2024, and has taken on billions in extra debt to finance the construction of new data centers, including the one in Norway. Its central bet is that its initial contracts with large tech companies—which average five years—will cover most or all of its up-front costs, allowing Nscale to continue to turn a profit by renting its chips out on the open market after those contracts expire. 

That wager depends on the demand for AI computing power remaining strong even after huge amounts of extra supply have come online thanks to the global data-center build-out. Neoclouds like Nscale will also have to fend off the reigning cloud giants in a market where they lack structural advantages, says Madison Rezaei, an analyst at Bernstein. “Most of their advantage comes from the fact they were early.” 

Payne is unfazed. While he casts Big Tech companies like Microsoft as collaborators rather than competitors, he also suggests Nscale can beat them at their own game. Nor is he worried about the nascent backlash to data centers around the world. “Pretty much every industry can be summarized in the following way: it’s turning energy into value,” he says. “AI infrastructure is the largest producer of value per electron. There is no second.”

Norway’s dramatic topography is a far cry from the plains of Texas, where a different neocloud is building the flagship Stargate campus for OpenAI and Oracle. Construction here, Lund says, is more complicated. We’re standing on a ridge created after half the hillside was blasted away with dynamite to create a flat patch of ground for a data hall. A stream that used to run down the slope now spurts over the cliff edge in a sad waterfall. Elsewhere on site, engineers spent $11 million constructing a single wall after discovering the rock below was too hard for ordinary steel pilings. 

All this expense is but a rounding error in the budget compared with the cost of the site’s chips. These data halls will eventually be filled with tens of thousands of Nvidia’s forthcoming Vera Rubin processors. An Nscale spokesperson declined to comment on the total cost of the build, but said the chips will account for 60% to 80% of it. The semiconductor analyst Stacy Rasgon at Bernstein estimated a total cost of more than $10 billion for the original Stargate Norway plan, which called for 100,000 of an earlier generation of Nvidia chip. Fewer of the new chips are likely to be needed, since each draws more power, but they are expected to cost more per unit—likely putting the final cost in a similar range. 

Nscale’s story is as much about financial engineering as the structural kind. From the start, the company found ways to mix debt, joint ventures, stock sales, and other maneuvers to find the funds necessary to cover the huge up-front costs of building data centers. The brains behind all that is Payne, who took an unlikely route into the business. He grew up in Newcastle, on Australia’s eastern coast, where he started his career in a coal mine. He spent a few years laboring on an open-pit mine in New South Wales, a gas plant, and tunnels under Sydney. During breaks he read business books, and eventually he started a series of companies.

One of the first to really take off, in the early 2020s, was a crypto-mining startup called Arkon Energy. Payne’s thesis was that he could acquire cheap energy that was “stranded” with no buyer, and use it to generate cryptocurrency. Doing so, he argued, was also good for the environment. “By putting more baseload demand on the grid, it allows, actually, a lot more renewable projects to be underwritten, increasing the energy supply,” Payne says. “When you think about it from that perspective, it’s actually a net benefit.” 

The downturn in the cryptocurrency market coincided with the launch of ChatGPT. Payne decided to pivot. Like crypto mining, artificial intelligence required buildings full of advanced chips. Coreweave and Crusoe, two of Nscale’s rival neoclouds, also began life as crypto miners. Companies around the world were scrambling for AI data centers that people like Payne knew how to build. 

The boom came at just the right time for Arkon, which in 2024 lost $102 million on $19 million of revenues, and was struggling to repay loans borrowed at up to 17.5%. Its financial statements that year flagged “significant doubt” about the company’s ability to survive. Payne wound down Arkon and spun out a new, U.K.-based company devoted to AI data centers: Nscale.

In one example of Nscale’s creative financing, Nvidia agreed in October to spend $60 million for the option to acquire a chunk of Nscale stock now worth around $200 million. In return, Nvidia agreed to step in as a backstop to the tune of $860 million, should Nscale be unable to meet its financial obligations at a data-center facility it is developing for Microsoft in Texas. Deals like this—which are common in the neocloud sector—have led some investors to worry about a possible structural weakness in the AI market. Some see a snake eating its own tail, with Nvidia both selling the chips and giving smaller companies like Nscale money to buy them. (Huang, the Nvidia chief, downplays those concerns, saying Nvidia’s investments in smaller companies make up a tiny part of its wealth and are meant to build a thriving AI ecosystem.)

Payne argues Nscale’s model is superior to that of rival neoclouds because it usually owns the land, buildings, and chips that power its data centers instead of renting one or more of those ingredients from a third party. That allows Nscale to keep costs down and limits the company’s risk, Payne says, because if the AI market slows, the company can repurpose its data centers rather than being on the hook to pay rent for an empty building. “We’re exiting a contract with an asset vs. a liability,” Payne says. (As well as building and operating five of its own data centers, Nscale also rents space in seven others, according to a spokesperson.)

As he steered the company through breakneck growth, Payne set out to stack Nscale’s board with heavyweights who could lend credibility to his startup. High on his list was Sheryl Sandberg, the former Google executive who joined Facebook in 2008 to turn an unruly upstart into a powerhouse. When Payne finally managed to secure a call with Sandberg, the first thing the former Meta chief operating officer told him was: “I don’t join boards, and I don’t do calls like this.” Then the Australian started talking. “Ninety minutes later, I was very interested in joining his board,” Sandberg says.

In March, she officially joined Nscale’s board of directors—her first big move in the business world since she quit Meta’s board in 2024. One of the factors that persuaded Sandberg to take the plunge was reading a note that Payne had recently sent to his executives, laying out both a sweeping vision for the company and a detailed road map for how to get there. “The only person I’d ever seen write like that was Mark Zuckerberg,” she says. “I see in Josh a potentially generationally defining leader.”

The first phase of the project in Narvik will consume around 230 megawatts of power—nearly as much as all of Norway’s existing data centers combined, and roughly the total used by 190,000 U.S. homes. But contractors on site are already laying the groundwork for a second, bigger phase of construction, under the assumption that the required power permit from the local authorities is likely to be granted.

Some energy economists fault the logic of Payne’s argument that data centers will be good for the environment because they create consistent demand that gives investors the confidence to bankroll new renewable projects. It is true that tech companies have historically accelerated the arrival of renewable energy by promising to buy electricity, says Olivier Darmouni, an associate professor at the business school HEC Paris. But as the AI race accelerates, many companies are no longer waiting the five to seven years it now takes to connect new clean power plants to the grid.

So even as companies like Nscale are scooping up the last remaining “stranded” clean energy—like the hydropower in northern Norway—they are simultaneously turning to fossil fuels in greater quantities. Nscale is currently constructing a data center in West Virginia next to a gas plant that is not connected to the energy grid, thus bypassing the multi-year waits for grid connectivity. This fossil-fuel-powered data center will be far bigger, and use far more power, than the one in Norway. “In North America, natural gas is the only fuel that meets the scale, speed, and reliability demands of AI infrastructure today,” says Nscale’s chief power and energy officer, Daniel Shapiro. “Renewables can’t economically deliver 24/7 baseload.” 

The low energy prices that are attracting data-center builders to Norway are unlikely to last for long, either. Partially as a result of surging demand from data centers, electricity prices in northern Norway are expected to double within two to three years, says Tor Reier Lilleholt, the head of analysis at Volue Insight, an energy data company. Part of that increase was likely to happen anyway: years of unusually wet weather have caused rock-bottom electricity prices that analysts do not expect to last forever. But the dynamic of data centers sending prices upward is a pattern playing out across the world, including in the U.S., where Trump demanded in February that tech companies pay for any rise in consumers’ electricity costs out of their own pocketbooks.

The prospect of price increases in Norway, where cheap electricity helps soften the blow of long winters, is generating political opposition. “We might have an enormous amount of data centers in Norway within a few years,” says Lars Haltbrekken, a left-wing lawmaker in the Norwegian Parliament, who foresees the state’s total power consumption tripling or quadrupling by 2030. “That will be a problem for our electricity system.” 

Oslo sees data centers as a strategic asset, wants to build more of them, and has designated them critical national infrastructure. Tech companies, including Nvidia, OpenAI, and Nscale, have urged countries to construct them as a way of bolstering their sovereignty in the AI era. But Haltbrekken complains that the government has no way to stop overconstruction from eroding Norway’s strategic energy reserves. That’s because prospective builders only need to receive legal permits at the local level. Haltbrekken’s party is supporting a bill to give the government more powers to block data centers, though in a recent parliamentary vote it failed to secure a majority. 

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Lund, the site manager who was born and raised in Narvik, sees it differently. “For me, it’s obviously beneficial that we utilize the green electricity here, instead of sending it to London or Stockholm,” he says. Lars Norman Andersen, the administrator of Narvik municipality, is another staunch supporter of the project. He expects it will create 200 jobs, and praises Nscale for supporting a new technical-skills curriculum at a local university. 

Norway might seem a better place for data centers than the similarly energy-abundant United Arab Emirates—where an Amazon data center was hit by Iranian drones in March, and where -OpenAI is planning another Stargate campus. But in the high Arctic there is the looming threat of Russia, with which Norway shares a polar border only a few hundred miles from Narvik. “In a direct conflict, we should expect this kind of infrastructure will be attacked first,” says Katarzyna Zysk, a professor at the Norwegian military’s Institute for Defence Studies, referring to data centers. “You could see them as ideal targets.”

It’s still raining in Narvik. Lund is behind the wheel of his electric car now, driving to a nearby hydropower plant—a turbine buried deep in the heart of a mountain, fed by water from a dam high above. This entire plant can generate 60 megawatts of electricity, little more than a tenth of what his data center will use when finished.

When we visit, the turbine is not spinning. Energy prices here are so low that the flow of water has been plugged, with officials deciding that it’s better to stockpile than flood the market with even more energy. The plant’s operator, a hulking Norwegian in blue overalls, is enthusiastic about the nearby data center’s effect on demand. “With the prices going up,” he says, “we’ll turn it back on.”

The length of the day has just overtaken that of the night here; even Lund’s unhappiness about the weather is tempered by his optimism for the oncoming summer. This evening, in Narvik’s town center, locals will don traditional Norwegian dress, along with joyful costumes, for a festival to welcome the end of winter. Soon the sun won’t dip below the horizon at all, drenching the valley in perpetual light. 

It is in this beatific state that a poster in the site’s head office depicts the completed complex—a 3D rendering of gleaming data centers that back up to green forested slopes. The only snow in the image is that which caps the tall mountains beyond the fjord in the far distance. □