AI hyperscaler Nscale has raised $1.1 billion (£820 million) in Series B financing, marking the largest round of its kind in European history.
The round was led by Aker ASA, with existing backer Sandton Capital joined by Blue Owl Managed Funds, Dell, Fidelity, G Squared, Nokia, NVIDIA, Point72 and T.Capital.
Headquartered in London, the firm operates globally as an AI-native infrastructure platform.
Its vertically integrated model spans compute, networking, storage, managed software and AI services, delivered through a mix of owned and colocated data centres.
The funding will be used to deploy large-scale AI infrastructure across Europe, North America and the Middle East, as well as accelerate the rollout of its ‘AI factory’ data centres in projects such as Stargate UK and Stargate Norway.
It will also expand its vertically integrated AI cloud platform, grow its engineering and operations teams, and strengthen delivery for enterprise and government customers worldwide.
Stargate Norway, one of its recently-announced major projects, is being delivered in partnership with Aker ASA and OpenAI to deliver Europe’s first hyperscale AI site, with 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs targeted by the end of 2026.
This was followed by a multi-billion-dollar agreement with Microsoft to develop infrastructure in Narvik, Norway.
In the UK, the company has committed to the country’s largest AI supercomputer at its Loughton AI Campus, alongside the joint Stargate UK venture with OpenAI and NVIDIA focused on sovereign workloads.
The firm’s leadership team brings experience from more than 50 data centre builds, large-scale supercomputing and multi-billion-dollar infrastructure operations.
The news comes just a week after Jensen Huang, CEO of participating investor NVIDIA, pledged a £500m investment into Nscale.
“We are building the AI-native Infrastructure platform of tomorrow,” said CEO Josh Payne.
“AI is reshaping industries, economies, and national strategies – but it cannot happen without the physical backbone: the data centres, the GPUs and the software to orchestrate them.
“We are building a vertically integrated, AI-engineered foundation designed to power the next generation of technological change.”
Øyvind Eriksen, president & CEO of Aker ASA, added: “AI is reshaping the global economy and redefining the value of renewable energy.
“With Nscale, we’re backing infrastructure that’s sovereign, scalable and purpose-built to accelerate this transformation.”
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