Nscale, a British hyperscaler engineered specifically for AI applications, has raised €146 million in Series A funding to accelerate its expansion across Europe and North America.
The funding round was led by Sandton Capital Partners, with participation from Kestrel, Bluesky Asset Management, and Florence Capital. According to the Hoffman Agency, this is one of the largest Series A funding rounds in the UK.
Since launching from stealth in May 2024, Nscale is aiming to position itself as a leading provider of AI-ready data centres and high-performance AI cloud services. Its vertically integrated model combines sustainable data centre development, massive-scale GPU infrastructure, and tailored AI cloud solutions. This full-stack approach allows Nscale to design its data centres and GPU superclusters from the ground up, seeking to provide unmatched performance, efficiency, and scalability for AI workloads.
Joshua Payne, CEO of Nscale, commented on the company’s growth: “The AI market is scaling rapidly, and so are we,” comments 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.”
Nscale’s full-stack AI 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 plans to launch a public cloud service in Q1 2025 that will provide developers access to purpose-built inference and training solutions in a flexible development environment.
Demand for Nscale’s infrastructure has grown rapidly, quickly growing its pipeline of greenfield data centres across Europe and North America from 300MW to 1.3GW, with 120MW planned for 2025 development. These sites will be designed from the ground up to support large supercluster deployments for global hyperscalers and LLM platforms, leveraging the latest advancements in closed-loop direct liquid cooling to deliver performance and efficiency, while minimising environmental impact.
Nscale 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.
“We are excited to double down on our investment in Nscale with our lead investment in the Series A round,” comments Rael Nurick, Co-Founder at Sandton Capital Partners. “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.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/12/london-based-nscale-secures-e146-million-series-a-to-fuel-ai-infrastructure-growth-and-expansion/
