OpenAI increases European market expansion, European headquarters in Dublin, AI inference computing power chain ushered in new order signals

Zhitong Finance App learned that OpenAI, a global leader in AI application development, is expanding its European headquarters in Dublin and will add 250 new jobs. The ChatGPT developer will lease up to 88,000 square feet of office space at the Tropical Fruit Warehouse office in Dublin's Docklands to meet “the rapidly growing demand for strong AI applications from users, customers and developers in Europe,” the company said in a statement. OpenAI currently employs around 100 people in Ireland.

Some media previously quoted information revealed by people familiar with the matter as reporting that the company is considering expanding its Dublin office, which also fully highlights its competitive pattern of accelerating the global penetration rate of artificial intelligence services.

Ireland is currently home to the European headquarters of many large technology companies, such as Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms Inc., Apple, and Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. Anthropic is also expanding its Dublin team size.

Ireland has been particularly hard hit by layoffs associated with the big wave of AI applications. Meta Platforms Inc. and TikTok, a subsidiary of ByteDance, have both recently announced that they will cut jobs in Ireland.

According to a recent statement, the ChatGPT developer added new jobs in Ireland covering AI data center engineering, enterprise user operations, human resources, financial infrastructure, privacy, and legal functions.

“Ireland's talent base and strong research ecosystem provide us with the best conditions to take full advantage of the unprecedented AI revolution,” Irish Prime Minister Michelle Martin said in a statement.

OpenAI added 250 jobs in Dublin and expanded its European headquarters to 88,000 square feet, a demand-side and commercialized infrastructure signal rather than a direct data center capital expenditure announcement. The new positions cover engineering, user operations, sales, privacy, and law, which means that OpenAI is upgrading its European business from simple product sales to a regional operating center of “enterprise deployment+technical support+compliance governance+developer ecosystem”. The increase in the adoption rate of European companies brought about not only one-time model training requirements, but also a heavy-scale AI application-side inference load dominated by long-term and continuously growing API calls, agent operations, and multi-modality.

The key growth in the computing power industry chain comes from regionalized reasoning and data sovereignty. OpenAI has allowed eligible European enterprise customers to complete GPU inference and achieve data residency in Europe, which means that sensitive workloads in finance, healthcare, government, and large enterprises will enter more local or regional data centers rather than be entirely concentrated in US computing clusters. The Dublin team is responsible for translating these requirements into actual deployment, while European physical computing power is being carried out by broader infrastructure expansion; for example, Stargate Europe Division - Stargate Norway plans the first 230MW capacity and aims to deploy 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2026. This benefits not only GPUs, but also large data center operators such as HBM, CPUs, advanced packaging, optical modules, liquid cooling, power equipment, and “new clouds.”

As far as the big model technology iteration is concerned, the Dublin expansion will shorten the feedback chain between the actual workload of European customers and model development: engineering and user operation teams can continuously collect multi-language performance, agent reliability, industry task effects, and safety compliance issues, and reverse promote post-training, evaluation systems, tool calls, and enterprise product optimization, but this does not mean that OpenAI has moved its core pre-training research center to Ireland.

A deeper industry trend is that the AI arms race is shifting from “who has the highest benchmark score” to who can simultaneously control computing power supply, enterprise distribution, regional compliance, and actual production data feedback. As a result, financial market investment trends should pay more attention to computing power bottlenecks that continue to handle massive AI inference loads, and cloud computing platforms with regional deployment and data governance capabilities, plus AI application layers that can transform model capabilities into quantifiable productivity and cash flow, so it is not appropriate to judge the prosperity of the AI industry using only a single model release.