London AI hyperscaler Nscale in $155m funding round - UKTN

London AI hyperscaler Nscale in $155m funding round – UKTN

Posted by Admin December 9, 2024 Tech

London AI hyperscaler Nscale in 5m funding round – UKTN

A London-based AI hyperscaler has raised $155m in one of the biggest Series A funding rounds of the year in the UK as it capitalises on a surge in compute needed to support artificial intelligence scale-ups.

Nscale, which launched from stealth in May 2024, is designing data centre sites to support large supercluster deployments for global hyperscalers and LLM platforms, using the latest closed-loop direct liquid cooling technology to improve performance and efficiency while minimising environmental impact.

The company hopes to use the cash to quickly grow its pipeline of greenfield data centres across Europe and North America from 300MW to 1.3GW, with 120MW planned for 2025 development. It claims it can deploy bespoke GPU clusters tailored to customers’ requirements faster than competitors and at any scale with better unit economics.

Nscale said it will launch a public cloud service early next year that will provide developers access to purpose-built inference and training solutions in a flexible development environment.

The funding round was led by led by Sandton Capital Partners, with participation from Kestrel 0x1, Blue Sky Capital Managers Ltd, and Florence Capital. Kestrel general partner Philippe Sachs is also chairman of Nscale.

“The AI market is scaling rapidly, and so are we,” said Joshua Payne, CEO of Nscale.

“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.”

Payne was previously founder and chairman of Arkon Energy, a company which developed renewable energy-powered bitcoin mining 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.”