OpenAI has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Australian data center operator NextDC to open a Stargate facility in Sydney.

The project is set to be located at NextDC's S7 site in Western Sydney.

Plans for S7 were revealed last year. The AU$7 billion (US$4.5bn) site in Eastern Creek covers approximately 258,000 sqm (2.78 million sq ft) of developable land area; the company said it could offer up to 550MW at full build-out.

In June, in partnership with policy house Mandala Partners, OpenAI announced an 'AI Economic Blueprint for Australia.'

"We believe that together with Australian businesses, policymakers, developers, startups, and educators, we can harness the power of AI to make Australians’ lives better and more prosperous," the company said at the time.

The blueprint called for data center approval processes in the country to be streamlined, and for the government to create a National AI research resource to provide shared compute/data.

Mandala research – commissioned for Data Centres Australia by AirTrunk, Amazon Web Services, CDC Data Centres, and NextDC – found that data centers currently use around two percent of the nation's power, but that is projected to reach six percent by 2030.

Alongside its significant US buildout, OpenAI has plans for a number of Stargate projects across the globe.

The company is backing a data center in the UAE that could support up to 5GW. In Europe, Nscale and Aker are developing a Stargate Norway project with around 100,000 GPUs, while Nscale is also deploying a smaller 8k GPU Stargate development in the UK, potentially spread across multiple sites.

An Argentine data center has been proposed, and the company has signed an MoU with SK Telecom to develop an AI data center in the southwest region of South Korea.

It has also discussed the possibility of a data center in Canada, and is reportedly in talks with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) about a potential Stargate data center in India.