Nscale, the British cloud computing firm backed by several U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), and OpenAI, has raised $1.1 billion in its latest funding round. This comes as major tech companies around the world ramp up their investments in building out their artificial intelligence capacity, sparking fears of an AI bubble.
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Nscale seeks to harness renewable energy to provide an infrastructure platform for AI compute capacity. The London-based company offers networking, storage, managed software, and AI services via its own and “colocated” or shared data centers.
‘Europe Needs a Hyperscaler’
Nscale, in a statement, said the new investment, which it called “the largest Series B in UK and European history,” will help it speed
“We are building the AI-native infrastructure platform of tomorrow,” said Josh Payne, CEO of Nscale. “Europe needs a hyperscaler, and Nscale is rising to the challenge,” Payne added.
The new funding round was spearheaded by Norwegian industrial investment company Aker ASA (AKAAF), with ongoing support from existing investors like Sandton Capital, and contributions from Blue Owl (OWL), Dell Technologies (DELL), Fidelity Management & Research Company, G Squared (GSQD), Nokia (NOK), NVIDIA, Point72, and T.Capital.
Nscale Banks on the Stargate Project
Stargate is a massive $500 billion AI data center infrastructure project backed by major U.S. tech companies such as OpenAI and Oracle (ORCL), in partnership with Japanese investment conglomerate SoftBank (SFTBF) and British semiconductor designer Arm Holdings (ARM). The project, which is still in the works, is also being extended to other parts of the world, including India.
Nscale’s Series B funding is the latest in its recent investment-attraction spree, aided by the Stargate project. Nscale, Microsoft, and Aker ASA recently signed a $6.2 billion deal to build high-performance AI infrastructure in Narvik, Norway.
The deal builds on the Stargate Norway Project, which has brought together Nscale, OpenAI, and Nvidia. The project seeks to deliver 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) by the end of 2026. Furthermore, the three companies are separately collaborating to establish Stargate UK.
The goal here is to build AI data centers across a number of sites in the UK. The infrastructure will be designed to deploy OpenAI’s technology and target the development of the UK’s “sovereign workloads” — this refers to AI tasks run within the UK’s borders, under the British government’s legal, security, and data governance frameworks.
Nscale Eyes ‘UK’s Largest AI Supercomputer’
Meanwhile, Nscale also recently entered a separate arrangement with Microsoft—as part of the UK-US Technology Partnership—to build “the UK’s largest AI supercomputer” in Loughton, a suburban town near London.
The goal is to build 50MW of AI capacity and have the site host over 23,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs by the first quarter of 2027. The facility is set to play a major role in boosting Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services throughout the UK.
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