AI hyperscaler Nscale secures $155 million in Series A funding

Nscale has raised $155 million in Series A funding to accelerate expansion across Europe and North America. Led by Sandton Capital Partners, with participation from Kestrel, Bluesky Asset Management, and Florence Capital, this oversubscribed funding round signals strong confidence in Nscale’s path to building the hyperscaler, purposely engineered for AI.

Nscale develops sustainable AI-ready data centres, deploys massive-scale GPU infrastructure, and delivers high-performance AI cloud services. This unique full-stack approach enables Nscale to co-design the data centre and GPU supercluster infrastructure to deliver unrivalled 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, quickly 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 uniquely positioned to capitalise on the market for large-scale AI infrastructure, and can deliver bespoke GPU clusters at any scale for governments, AI scale-ups, and global enterprises.

“The AI market is scaling rapidly, and so are we,” comments 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,” comments 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.”

This investment is the latest in a series of significant milestones, reflecting Nscale’s continued commitment to driving innovation and delivering exceptional value to customers since it raised $30 million in seed funding in December 2023.

Nscale 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. The company has also achieved industry recognition for advancing AI high-performance compute infrastructure: Nscale’s Svartisen Cluster was included in the 2024 Top500 list of the most powerful super-computing systems worldwide.