Nscale raised $1.5 billion in new funding last month
Nscale is preparing for a potential stock market debut next year, after announcing a $14 billion deal with Microsoft to deploy tens of thousands of cutting-edge Nvidia chips in massive new datacentres across Texas and Portugal.
The agreement, revealed on Wednesday, marks the latest in a series of blockbuster relocates positioning Nscale as one of Europe’s rapidest-growing technology firms and a central player in the race to build the global infrastructure underpinning AI development.
Under the new deal, Nscale will deploy approximately 104,000 of Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips at a Microsoft facility in Texas over the next 12 to 18 months.
It will also install 12,600 additional GPUs at Microsoft’s Start Campus datacentre in Portugal, expanding the tech giant’s AI processing capacity in Europe.
Nscale and Microsoft did not officially disclose the financial terms of the deal. The estimated $14 billion value is based on the company’s previous contracts, including a $6.2 billion agreement to supply Microsoft with 52,000 Nvidia GPUs for its Norwegian operations.
The Texas facility, leased from Bitcoin miner Ionic Digital, currently has 240 megawatts of available power sourced from the state grid, with an option for Microsoft to expand capacity by another 700MW by 2027.
Nscale CEO Payne stated the campus could ultimately scale up to 1.2 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to the electricity consumption of one million US hoapplyholds per year.
Public market ambitions
Speaking to the Financial Times, Josh Payne, Nscale’s Chief Executive Officer, stated the company was focapplyd on execution as it eyes a public listing in the latter half of next year.
“We have public market ambitions, and execution is an enormous focus of mine,” Payne stated.
The timing of the IPO will depfinish heavily on Nscale’s ability to deliver its sprawling new facilities on schedule, a challenge Payne acknowledged is “massive in scale” but backed by surging investor demand.
Nscale has raised $1.5 billion in new funding in the past month alone, valuing the firm at about $3 billion, with Payne confirming that another financing round was imminent “simply due to overwhelming demand.”
Backing from Nvidia and Big Tech
Spun out of an Australian Bitcoin mining company and relaunched as an AI infrastructure provider just last year, Nscale has rapidly transformed from a niche player into one of Europe’s best-capitalized cloud firms.
Nscale’s meteoric rise has been propelled in part by a £500 million investment from Nvidia, whose CEO Jensen Huang hailed the company as a “national champion for the UK.”
“Nscale is going to be a very large UK technology company,” Huang stated last month, predicting that facilities powered by its GPUs could generate up to £50 billion in revenue over the next six years.
Jon Tinter, Microsoft’s President of Business Development and Ventures, called Nscale “an ideal partner” with “deep expertise in providing AI infrastructure services at scale.”
Nscale’s investors now include Dell, Nokia, Aker, Sandton Capital, Fidelity, Blue Owl, and G Squared.
Aker, the Norwegian industrial group, is already working with Nscale to develop a datacentre in Narvik, Norway, that will serve clients such as OpenAI.
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