British AI firm Nscale raises $1.1 billion in Nvidia-backed funding round

Nscale, a London-based company specializing in artificial intelligence infrastructure, has successfully raised a staggering $1.1 billion in its latest Series B funding round. This significant investment, announced on Thursday, was spearheaded by Aker, a Norwegian industrial investment firm, and included contributions from notable companies such as Nvidia, Nokia, and Dell. The influx of capital underscores the increasing demand for high-performance computing infrastructure essential for training and deploying advanced AI models from leading tech giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. As Nscale positions itself as a key player in the U.K.'s ambition to establish itself as a global AI leader, it is set to play a crucial role in expanding AI computing capabilities across Europe. Josh Payne, Nscale's CEO and co-founder, expressed his enthusiasm, stating, "We are creating one of the largest global infrastructure platforms of its kind—designed to meet the surging demand and facilitate breakthroughs at an unprecedented scale." He emphasized that Nscale's efforts will enable customers to access much-needed compute capacity, thereby accelerating the development of secure, compliant, and energy-efficient AI infrastructure. Originally spun off from Arkon Energy, an Australian cryptocurrency mining firm, in 2023, Nscale was founded to meet the growing need for data centers capable of handling AI workloads. The company is collaborating with OpenAI in both the U.K. and Norway to develop new data centers as part of OpenAI's Stargate investment initiative. A portion of the newly acquired Series B funding will be allocated to expedite the construction of these data centers across Europe. Nscale plans to invest $1 billion in the Norwegian project, aiming to deploy 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) at this site by 2027. Additionally, the U.K. facility is set to launch with 8,000 GPUs in its first phase early next year, with potential future expansions that could increase the total capacity to approximately 31,000 GPUs.