UK AI data centre startup Nscale has raised $433m funding just days after announcing a $1.1bn Series B, as investors continue to pour money into the country’s AI infrastructure.
Founded less than 18 months ago, Nscale has emerged as one of the key players in the booming AI infrastructure space in Europe in recent months, raising huge sums of cash and inking partnerships with tech giants including OpenAI and Nvidia to roll out compute capacity.
The fresh funds come in the form of a pre-Series C simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) — a contract where an investor gives a company cash and receives shares at a later date.
Nvidia, Nokia, Dell and Blue Owl, which all backed Nscale’s Series B, alongside other existing and new investors, participated in the round.
“We’re overwhelmed by the interest we’ve received,” said Josh Payne, CEO and founder of Nscale.
“This commitment to participating in our pre-Series C SAFE, just days after the close of our Series B funding, represents a powerful endorsement of our vision to deliver sovereign, scalable infrastructure for the AI era.”
Nscale, which runs and leases data centre capacity specifically for AI uses, said in January it would invest £2.5bn into UK data centre infrastructure over the next three years.
Both the Series B announced last week and the pre-Series C include the £500m Nvidia’s chief Jensen Huang announced the company would invest into the startup last week. At the time, he said that over the next six years Nscale could hit revenue of up to $50bn.
In July, the startup announced a deal with OpenAI to design and build an AI gigafactory — data centres made to cope with the huge processing requirements of the technology — in Norway, as part of a plan dubbed a European “Stargate”.
Nscale also pledged to furnish UK AI data centres with 60k Nvidia Blackwell GPUs as part of an £11bn investment alongside US hyperscaler Coreweave. Nvidia called it the largest rollout of AI infrastructure in the country’s history.
