Investment

London firm Nscale has secured £122 million in Series A funding to accelerate AI infrastructure expansion and meet soaring demand for large-scale compute.

Sandton Capital Partners led the oversubscribed funding round to accelerate Nscale’s hyperscale growth across Europe and North America.

The round saw participation from Kestrel 0x1, Blue Sky Capital Managers Ltd and Florence Capital.

Launched from stealth in May 2024, Nscale develops sustainable AI-ready data centres, deploys massive-scale GPU infrastructure and delivers high-performance AI cloud services. It says this approach enables Nscale to co-design the data centre and GPU supercluster infrastructure to deliver unrivalled speed, performance and efficiency on AI workloads.

The private cloud platform is designed to support the entire generative AI lifecycle, enabling developers to run and train AI models. Nscale’s platform provides bare metal and virtualised GPU nodes, Kubernetes-native services (NKS), AI workload scheduling powered by SLURM, and advanced serverless and dedicated inferencing options. 

In addition, Nscale is launching a public cloud service in Q1 2025 that will provide developers access to purpose-built inference and training solutions in a flexible development environment.

Nscale has quickly grown its pipeline of greenfield data centres across Europe and North America from 300MW to 1.3GW, with 120MW planned for 2025 development.

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“The AI market is scaling rapidly, and so are we,” said Joshua Payne, CEO of Nscale. “Nscale manages every layer of infrastructure in the value chain to meet the intensive needs of large-scale AI customers. In particular, the largest risk to the market’s ability to scale is the large contiguous tranches of electricity required to power these large GPU superclusters. 

“Nscale has a 1.3GW pipeline of sites in our portfolio, which allows us to design from the ground up, the data centre, the supercluster and the cloud environment end-to-end for our customers. This means we can deploy bespoke GPU clusters tailored to customers’ requirements, do this faster than competitors and at any scale, all while delivering superior unit economics. 

“With the support of our investors, we can now reach more customers globally with bespoke designed, sustainable and cost-effective AI infrastructure that unlocks new AI capabilities, products, and services.”

The firm recently announced a partnership with Open Innovation AI, a leading GPU orchestration platform in MENA, targeting the deployment of 30,000 GPUs over the next three years. 

Rael Nurick, co-founder at Sandton Capital Partners, added: “We are excited to double down on our investment in Nscale with our lead investment in the Series A round.

“With a notable founder track record, established industry partnerships, and a unique vertically integrated approach, Nscale is building the hyperscale AI platform to power enterprise AI at scale.”

Nscale previously raised $30m in seed funding in December 2023.

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