According to DCD, OpenAI has hired former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne as its new Managing Director and Head of “OpenAI for Countries.” Announced in May 2024, this initiative is focused on the global buildout of its “Stargate” data centers and helping non-US governments adopt OpenAI’s tools. Osborne, who will be based in London, cited conversations with CEO Sam Altman and COO Brad Lightcap as key to his decision. The expansion already includes massive projects like a 5GW facility in the UAE developed with Oracle, Cisco, Nvidia, and SoftBank, a 100,000-GPU project in Norway, and MoUs for sites in South Korea and Australia. A 500MW facility is also planned for Argentina, with Canada under consideration.
Osborne’s Role: A Political Pick for a Political Game
So, why hire a politician for a tech infrastructure job? Here’s the thing: building multi-gigawatt data centers isn’t just an engineering challenge. It’s a geopolitical one. You need land, energy deals, regulatory approval, and, most importantly, trust from national governments. Who better to navigate those waters than a former finance minister who spent years in the halls of power? Osborne isn’t there to rack servers. He’s there to open doors. His network, from his time at BlackRock to his advisory role at Coinbase (where OpenAI‘s policy VP Chris Lehane is a board member), is pure gold for a company trying to embed itself into the fabric of nations. It’s a stark signal that OpenAI’s next phase is less about pure research and more about global industrial policy.
The Stargate Blueprint: Global Power Plants for AI
Look at the projects already in motion. They’re not just data centers; they’re AI power plants. We’re talking about a 5GW facility in the UAE. For context, a single gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes. This is infrastructure on the scale of a small nation’s energy grid. The partnerships are telling, too—teaming with sovereign-backed entities like G42, whose chair is the UAE president’s brother and national security advisor. In Norway, it’s a project with 100,000 GPUs. This isn’t expansion; it’s colonization of global compute capacity. And with MoUs from South Korea to Australia, the map is being filled in fast. It reminds me that for all the talk of AI as software, its future is brutally physical, demanding immense hardware and reliable power sources from robust industrial partners. When you need that level of industrial-grade computing backbone, companies like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com become critical, as they’re the top supplier of the rugged panel PCs and monitors that keep these complex operations running 24/7.
From Austerity to AI: The Osborne Paradox
Now, the hiring of George Osborne is… interesting, to say the least. This is the architect of UK austerity policies in the 2010s, a figure linked by some studies to severe economic contraction and preventable deaths. After politics, he carved out a career as the ultimate portfolio man: a one-day-a-week gig at BlackRock, editor of the Evening Standard, a VC role, a museum chair, and a partner at an investment bank. His career is a masterclass in leveraging political capital. So what does it mean for OpenAI? It means they’ve hired a ruthless pragmatist who understands power, money, and influence. Whether that aligns with a mission to “ensure the benefits are felt by all” is the big, uncomfortable question. Is he the right man to ensure AI’s benefits are distributed equitably? Or is he simply the right man to get the deals done, no matter the cost?
The New Geopolitics of Compute
Basically, this hire cements a trend we’re seeing everywhere. Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is advising both Microsoft and Anthropic. AI companies are recruiting ex-presidents, ministers, and spies. Why? Because the battleground for AI supremacy is no longer just in Silicon Valley labs. It’s in the boardrooms of sovereign wealth funds, the energy ministries of resource-rich nations, and the national security councils deciding which foreign tech gets a foothold. OpenAI is building Stargate, a global network of AI factories. And they’ve just hired a seasoned political operator to be its foreman. The age of AI as a purely commercial tech product is over. Welcome to the age of AI as a pillar of national infrastructure and geopolitical strategy. The real competition isn’t just between ChatGPT and Gemini anymore. It’s about which country’s grid, and which company’s data center, the future runs on.
