Nscale raises $155m in Series A funding
December 9, 2024
Nscale, the hyperscaler engineered for AI, has raised $155 million (€146.4m) in Series A funding to accelerate expansion across Europe and North America. The oversubscribed funding round was led by Sandton Capital Partners, with participation from Kestrel, Bluesky Asset Management,and Florence Capital.
Nscale develops sustainable AI-ready data centres, deploys massive-scale GPU infrastructure, and delivers high-performance AI cloud services. This full-stack approach enables Nscale to co-design the data centre and GPU supercluster infrastructure to deliver speed, performance, and efficiency on AI workloads.
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 is launching a public cloud service in Q1 2025 that will provide developers access to purpose-built inference and training solutions in a flexible development environment.
Since launching from stealth in May 2024, Nscale has experienced insatiable demand for AI infrastructure, 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 maximum performance and efficiency, while minimising environmental impact. The hyperscaler is now positioned to capitalise on the market for large-scale AI infrastructure, and can deliver GPU clusters at any scale for governments, AI scale-ups, and global enterprises.
“The AI market is scaling rapidly, and so are we,” said 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.”
“We are excited to double down on our investment in Nscale with our lead investment in the Series A round,” added 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.”
Nscale raised $30 million in seed funding in December 2023. Nscale also 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.