British AI firm Nscale raises $1.1 billion in Nvidia-backed funding round

British artificial intelligence infrastructure firm Nscale is raising heaps of cash as it looks to ramp up the deployment of AI data centers across Europe.

Nscale, which is based in London, said Thursday that it has raised $1.1 billion in a bumper Series B funding round. The investment was led by Aker, the Norwegian industrial investment company, with additional participation from a raft of firms including Nvidia, Nokia and Dell.

The investment highlights continued demand for high-powered computing infrastructure, which is required to train and run powerful foundational AI models from companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.

Nscale has become a central player in Britain’s ambition to become a global AI powerhouse. Last week, the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI announced multibillion-dollar projects involving Nscale to build out AI computing infrastructure across the U.K.

“We are creating one of the largest global [infrastructure] platforms of its kind – purpose-built to meet surging demand and unlock breakthroughs at unprecedented scale,” said Josh Payne, Nscale’s CEO and co-founder, in a statement.

“This allows Nscale to provide our customers access to scarce, and highly sought after, compute capacity and rapidly accelerate the build-out of secure, compliant and energy-efficient AI infrastructure,” he added.

Nscale was spun out from Arkon Energy, an Australian cryptocurrency mining firm, in 2023 to address soaring demand for data centers capable of handling AI workloads.

It is working with OpenAI in the U.K. and Norway to build new data centers as part of the ChatGPT maker’s Stargate investment project. Nscale said that part of the Series B funding would go toward “enabling the rapid rollout” of the Stargate data center projects in Europe.

The company is committing $1 billion for the Norwegian project, with the goal of racking up 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) at the site before 2027. The U.K. site, meanwhile, will house 8,000 GPUs in its first phase early next year, with the option to expand capacity to around 31,000 GPUs over time.

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