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.
Torkjell Lund poses for a portrait close to the data center construction site in Narvik, Norway.
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.
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.”
A scene at the construction site of the Nscale data center project in Narvik.A worker guides a steel beam into place on the roof of a data hall at the construction site.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.
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—Photograph by Ingmar Björn Nolting for TIME
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.
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.
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.”
Global data centers already consume as much power as France; that figure is expected to double by 2030.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.
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.”
Workers inside an in-progress data hall at Nscale’s Narvik data center site.An aerial view of excavator vehicles working at Nscale’s Narvik data center construction site.
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.
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.)
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 data center will consume up to 520 megawatts of electricity when fully operational.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.
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.
View of a hydroelectric power plant in Glomfjord, NorwayA tunnel leading to a hydroelectric power plant inside a mountain near Narvik.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.
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.
An overview of Narvik, Norway, on March 20, 2026.
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.
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. □
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