Nscale, a London-based AI infrastructure company, secured $155 million in Series A funding to accelerate its expansion of specialized data centers across Europe and North America, marking growing investor confidence in companies building the backbone for artificial intelligence computing.
The funding round, which was oversubscribed, was led by Sandton Capital Partners with participation from Kestrel 0x1, Blue Sky Capital Managers Ltd, and Florence Capital. Barkers Point Capital Partners served as advisors on the deal.
The company, which emerged from stealth mode in May, has seen its pipeline of planned data center projects grow more than fourfold from 300 megawatts to 1.3 gigawatts, with 120 megawatts scheduled for development in 2025. These facilities will be engineered specifically for large-scale AI computing clusters, utilizing advanced liquid cooling systems to maximize performance while reducing environmental impact.
Nscale’s business model differs from traditional data center operators by taking a vertically integrated approach. The company develops its own sustainable data centers, installs GPU-based computing infrastructure, and provides cloud services tailored for AI applications. This strategy allows Nscale to optimize every aspect of its infrastructure for AI workloads, from the physical buildings to the software layer.
“The largest risk to the market’s ability to scale is the large contiguous tranches of electricity required to power these large GPU superclusters,” said Joshua Payne, CEO of Nscale. “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.”
The company plans to launch a public cloud service in the first quarter of 2025, adding to its existing private cloud platform that supports AI model development and training. Recently, Nscale partnered with Open Innovation AI to deploy 30,000 GPUs over three years in the Middle East and North Africa region.
The Series A round follows a $30 million seed funding round completed in December 2023. The company’s technical prowess was recently validated when its Svartisen Cluster was named to the 2024 Top500 list of the world’s most powerful computing systems.
