Nscale lands $2bn funding amid UK push to grow AI infrastructure
London-based AI infrastructure firm Nscale has raised $2bn (£1.6bn) in funding, raising its valuation to $14.6bn as Britain seeks to get ahead of the global AI computing race.
The series C round, led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries, has been backed by heavyweight investors including Nvidia, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Citadel and Point72.
The funding is set to speed up the firm’s build-out of large scale AI infrastructure, including data centres, across Europe, North America and Asia.
It’s a significant moment for a company founded less than two years ago, which has quickly become one of the most prominent players in Britain’s emerging AI infrastructure sector.
Founder and chief executive Josh Payne said: “This is the fourth industrial revolution; the world is changing at a rapid pace.
“Over the next five years artificial intelligence will be integrated into every industry, every product and every job… This is leading to the largest infrastructure buildout in human history.”
Britain’s AI goals
The raise comes as the UK government pushes to position the country as an “AI maker rather than an AI taker”, with ministers looking for domestic firms capable of supporting the massive computing capacity required to train and run advanced AI.
Nscale seems to have emerged as one of the firms central to that strategy. The homegrown company is working with Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia on a series of large-scale AI infrastructure projects, including the UK’s largest planned AI supercomputer in Essex.
Thia facility, located in Loughton, is expected to host tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs and deliver up to 90 megawatts of AI compute capacity once fully scaled.
Nscale already committed £2.5bn of investment into the UK as part of its broader data centre expansion plans back in summer, with further projects under development across Europe.
The company is also involved in the Stargate Norway project, a major AI compute hub designed to provide large-scale infrastructure for AI model training using renewable energy.
Alongside the funding round, Nscale also announced three high-profile appointments to its board.
Former Meta execs Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg – who is also a former UK deputy Prime Minister – and ex-Yahoo president Susan Decker will join the company’s board of directors.
The trio bring experience spanning global technology companies, corporate governance and tech policy. Clegg, who previously served as president of global affairs at Meta, has been closely involved in regulatory debates around AI and digital governance.
The infrastructure race
The scale of capital flowing into data infrastructure reflects the growing importance of computing capacity as the backbone of the AI economy.
Access to energy, and the immense pressure which the technology imposes on the grid, has long been considered one of the central bottlenecks threatening the development of AI.
Rayyan Islam, co-founder of 8090 Industries, said: “Compute, energy and industrial-scale deployment capacity will determine which nations and companies lead the next generation of technological and economic progress.”
For the UK, backing companies like Nscale is increasingly seen as part of a broader strategy to ensure Europe retains some control over the infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence – an area currently dominated by US hyperscalers.
With billions now flowing into data centres, GPUs and AI cloud platforms, the competition to build that foundation is quickly becoming one of the defining industrial races of the decade.