Nscale Secures $155M Series A Funding to Expand AI-Optimized Data Center Infrastructure

AI data center builder Nscale nabs $155M investment - SiliconANGLE

Nscale Ltd., a London startup that builds data centers optimized for artificial intelligence workloads, has raised $155 million to grow its infrastructure footprint. The Series A round was announced this morning. Sandton Capital Partners led the investment with participation from Kestrel 0x1, Blue Sky Capital Managers and Florence Capital. The funding milestone comes a few weeks after an AI cluster built by Nscale made it into the Top500 ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The Svartisen Cluster nabbed the 156th spot with 12.38 petaflops of maximum performance and 66,528 cores. Nscale assembled the system from servers that each include six Advanced Micro Devices Inc. chips: two central processing units and four MI250X machine learning accelerators. The MI250X includes two graphics cards based on a six-nanometer process, as well as 128 gigabytes of onboard RAM for storing AI models' data. The servers are linked together by an Ethernet network that Nscale built using Broadcom Inc. silicon. The network implements a technology called RoCE can move data between two machines in a manner that bypasses their respective CPUs, which speeds up the flow of traffic. RoCE also automates tasks such as detecting overloaded network links and redirecting packets to other connections. At the software level, Nscale's hardware is powered by a custom infrastructure orchestration platform. It integrates Kubernetes with Slurm, a popular open-source framework for managing data center infrastructure. Both Kubernetes and Slurm automate the task of determining what workload should run on which server in a cluster. However, they differ in several ways. Kubernetes has a self-healing mechanism, which allows it to automatically recover from certain types of malfunctions. Slurm, in turn, supports a network technology called MPI that can move data between different components of an AI workload with a high degree of efficiency. Nscale built the Svartisen Cluster in Glomfjord, a Norwegian village located inside the Arctic Circle. The data center (pictured) that houses the system draws power from a nearby hydroelectric dam and sits directly on a fiber-optic cable that links it to internet providers' infrastructure. The cable features double redundancy, which means it can continue operating even if multiple important components fail. Nscale makes its infrastructure available to customers in multiple ways. It provides AI training clusters as well as an inference service that automatically adds or removes hardware resources based on workload demand. There are also bare-metal infrastructure options, which enable users to more extensively customize the software stack that powers their deployments. Customers may download AI models from an algorithm library provided by Nscale or bring their own. According to the company, there's a preconfigured compiler toolkit for turning user workloads into a form that can run efficiently on its servers. Currently, Nscale's construction pipeline comprises data centers with aggregate power consumption of 300 megawatts. That's ten times the amount of electricity used by the company's Glomfjord facility. Using the Series A funding round announced today, Nscale will grow its pipeline by 1,000 megawatts. "The largest risk to the market's ability to scale is the large contiguous tranches of electricity required to power these large GPU superclusters," said Nscale Chief Executive Officer Joshua Payne. "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." The company will build the new data centers in North America and Europe. According to the company, 120 megawatts' worth of data center capacity is scheduled to be built next year. The new infrastructure will help Nscale power a planned public cloud offering focused on training and inference workloads that is set to launch in the first quarter of 2025.

AI hyperscaler Nscale raises $155m to fuel expansion

The company will be launching a public cloud service early next year to provide developers access to purpose-built inference and training solutions. Nscale, the London-based artificial intelligence (AI) cloud provider, has raised $155m in a funding round to fuel its growth plans across Europe and North America. The oversubscribed Series A round was led by Sandton Capital Partners, and saw participation from Kestrel, Bluesky Asset Management, and Florence Capital. According to the AI hyperscaler, the funding will be used to accelerate the deployment of large-scale GPU clusters for AI training, fine-tuning, and inferencing workloads. It also plans to expand its 1.3GW pipeline of greenfield data centre sites - or sites that the company started from scratch - in Ohio, Texas, UK and Norway, and has a further 120MW planned for development in 2025. Currently, the company also has a 60MV renewable energy-powered data centre in Norway's Glomfjord. Moreover, Nscale is launching a public cloud service early next year which it expects will provide developers access to purpose-built inference and training solutions. The less than a year-old company that raised $30m in seed funding in December 2023 before launching from stealth in May 2024, develops AI-ready data centres, deploys GPU infrastructure, and delivers high-performance AI cloud services. According to Nscale, its full-stack approach - an approach where it develops both frontend and backend applications - enables the company to deliver "unrivalled" speed, performance and efficiency on AI workloads and is designed to support the generative AI life cycle, enabling developers to run and train AI models. "The AI market is scaling rapidly, and so are we," said Joshua Payne the CEO of the company. "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." Nscale recently announced a partnership with Open Innovation AI, an Abu Dhabi-based GPU orchestration platform, aiming to deploy 30,000 GPUs in the next three years. The AI boom has resulted in significant increase in the demand for energy. Recently, US firms announced they will be investing £6.3bn in the UK data centre infrastructure, in part, to support the development of AI in the country. Meanwhile Amazon Web Services announced an £8bn investment into the UK's digital infrastructure over the next five years, while a private company, DC01UK, announced a £3.75bn investment for a data centre in Hertfordshire. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Nscale Raises $155 Mn in Series A to Expand AI Ops

UK-based Nscale, an AI hyperscaler, has secured $155 million in Series A funding to expand its AI-focused infrastructure across Europe and North America. Sandton Capital Partners led the funding round, which included participation from Kestrel, Bluesky Asset Management, and Florence Capital. The funding follows Nscale's $30 million seed round in December 2023. The company claimed that the funding round underscores strong market confidence in its approach to hyperscale AI solutions. Nscale designs AI-specific data centres, deploys large-scale GPU infrastructure, and offers high-performance AI cloud services. "Nscale manages every layer of infrastructure to meet the intensive requirements of large-scale AI customers," said Joshua Payne, CEO of Nscale. Its full-stack platform claims to support the entire generative AI lifecycle, providing developers with tools to train and run AI models. The platform includes GPU nodes, Kubernetes-native services, AI workload scheduling, and serverless inferencing options. Nscale plans to launch a public cloud service in early 2025. Since its stealth launch in May 2024, Nscale has expanded its data centre pipeline from 300MW to 1.3GW. The company plans to develop 120MW of capacity in 2025, focusing on large supercluster deployments. Using advancements in direct liquid cooling, the company aims to maximise efficiency while minimising environmental impact. "With a 1.3GW pipeline, we can design end-to-end solutions faster and at any scale," Payne added. "This funding allows us to deliver bespoke GPU clusters globally while maintaining cost efficiency and sustainability." Meanwhile, Rael Nurick, co-founder of Sandton Capital Partners, highlighted Nscale's potential. "With a strong founder track record and vertically integrated approach, Nscale is positioned to power enterprise AI at scale," Nurick said. Nscale recently partnered with Open Innovation AI to deploy 30,000 GPUs in MENA over three years and received industry recognition with its Svartisen Cluster included in the 2024 Top 500 super-computing systems list.