Nscale Secures $2 Billion Series C Funding, Adds Sandberg and Clegg to Board at $14.6B Valuation

Nscale Raises $2 Billion and Adds Sandberg, Clegg to Board

Nscale, a UK developer for artificial intelligence data centers, has raised $2 billion in funding and added a trio of high-profile business leaders as directors, including former Meta Platforms Inc. executives Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg. Norwegian energy firm Aker ASA and investment firm 8090 Industries led the a the Series C round, which values the startup at $14.6 billion, the AI hyperscaler said in a statement on Monday. Several tech companies also participated in the round, including Nvidia Corp., Lenovo Group Ltd. and Nokia Oyj. Spun out of a cryptocurrency mining operation in early 2024, Nscale quickly become one of the most prominent data center newcomers cashing in on the AI boom. It's one of several so-called neo-cloud operators who rent out computing resources to companies developing AI. Nscale has tried to distinguish itself as a provider tailor-made for Europe, pledging major projects in the UK, Norway and Portugal, which are not yet operational. Nscale has raised funds quickly, bringing in $1.5 billion in a short span in 2025 and lining up around the same amount in loans earlier this year. Bloomberg previously reported the company was planning to raise a $2 billion round. Sandberg, the longtime chief operating officer at Facebook and its parent Meta, joins Nscale's board along with Clegg, a former British politician who ran Meta's policy operation before leaving in 2025. Nscale also added Susan Decker, a former Yahoo Inc. executive who is on the boards of multiple companies, including Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6 billion valuation

AI data center startup Nscale has raised $2 billion at a $14.6 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday, as the AI infrastructure boom continues. The Series C featured Nvidia and was led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries. It also featured Astra Capital Management, Citadel, Dell, Jane Street, Lenovo, Linden Advisors, Nokia, and Point72. Fresh funds would help accelerate Nscale's development of vertically integrated AI infrastructure -- from GPU compute and networking to data services and orchestration software -- across Europe, North America, and Asia, the company said in a statement. The AI boom is "leading to the largest infrastructure buildout in human history," said Josh Payne, CEO and founder of UK-based Nscale, echoing past comments from Jensen Huang, CEO at Nvidia, which invested in the round. "We are building this foundation that the market sits on, the engine of superintelligence."

Nscale raises $2bn Series C at $14.6bn valuation

The UK hyperscaler has now raised over $4.5bn across equity rounds in less than six months, and says it is the largest Series C ever closed in Europe. That claim deserves scrutiny. When Josh Payne founded Nscale, the company was barely a year old, and the world's appetite for GPU compute had not yet tipped into anything approaching panic. That was 2024. By March 2026, his company will have closed a $2 billion Series C, carry a $14.6 billion valuation, and have recruited three of the most recognisable names in global technology and politics to its board. The question is no longer whether Nscale can raise money. It is whether the infrastructure it is racing to build will be ready before the market moves on. Nscale announced the round today, led jointly by Aker ASA, the Norwegian industrial conglomerate that also led its $1.1 billion Series B in September 2025, and 8090 Industries, a Dallas-based industrial technology fund co-founded by Rayyan Islam. Additional investors in the round include Astra Capital Management, Citadel, Dell, Jane Street, Lenovo, Linden Advisors, Nokia, NVIDIA, and Point72. Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan acted as joint placement agents, and the raise is inclusive of the pre-Series C SAFE that Nscale closed in October 2025. The company says the round is the largest Series C ever completed in Europe. Nscale's proposition is vertically integrated AI infrastructure: GPU compute, networking, data services, and orchestration software, delivered from its own and colocated data centres across Europe, North America, and Asia. The pitch is that the bottleneck in the AI economy is not demand; everyone wants compute, but the ability to deploy capacity reliably and at scale. Nscale's data centres are designed from first principles to handle GPU-dense workloads rather than retrofitting facilities built for traditional cloud computing. The company has moved quickly. Since its Series B in September 2025, it has signed a $1.4 billion delayed-draw term loan backed by GPUs, which it announced in February 2026, and has secured large-scale contracts with Microsoft, including plans for a facility in Texas targeting 104,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs. Its data centre footprint spans Norway, the UK, Portugal, Iceland, and the US, with its Norwegian presence anchored by the Glomfjord and Narvik sites. In July 2025, it announced the Stargate Norway project alongside Aker and OpenAI, targeting 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by the end of 2026. Alongside the fundraising, Nscale has also resolved a structural question that had been hanging over the Norway operations. The Aker-Nscale joint venture, announced in July 2025, will be wound into Nscale as a wholly owned entity. Aker remains a leading shareholder, its CEO, Øyvind Eriksen, continues to sit on the board, and the company says all existing projects under the joint venture remain fully operational. The practical effect is to put delivery and governance under a single roof. "This step strengthens execution by putting delivery and governance under one roof, while keeping continuity for the people and projects already underway," Eriksen said in a statement. "We have full confidence in Nscale's ability to deliver responsibly in Norway over the long term." The three board appointments announced today are striking in different ways. Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta COO who stepped down from the company's board in 2024, is the co-founder of Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, an early-stage fund she has been building since 2021. Her addition brings operational credibility from a company that scaled to hundreds of billions in revenue during her tenure, and, notably, deep expertise in the advertising and data infrastructure that underpins modern AI products. Susan Decker, former president of Yahoo and CEO of the university community platform Raftr, brings financial acumen and a long record of corporate governance, including serving as lead director of Berkshire Hathaway. Her Berkshire role gives Nscale a board member with rare experience overseeing a conglomerate that owns businesses across energy, infrastructure, and financial services, the sectors Nscale is increasingly operating in. Nick Clegg is the most overtly political appointment. The former UK Deputy Prime Minister and Meta President of Global Affairs joined Hiro Capital as a General Partner in December 2025, where he focuses on spatial computing and AI investment across Europe. He joins Nscale's board, bringing a combination of European regulatory fluency, Meta-era experience of AI governance debates, and political networks that could prove valuable as Nscale pursues sovereign AI mandates and government contracts across the UK and EU. Payne, speaking in the press release, framed the round as more than a fundraiser. "Nscale is leading this buildout," he said, describing the company's ambition as building "the foundation that the market sits on, the engine of superintelligence." The language is bullish even by AI infrastructure standards. Nscale has raised over $4.5 billion in equity rounds since its Series B in September 2025. That velocity would be remarkable for any company; for one incorporated only in 2024, it is extraordinary. What it also means is that the gap between capital raised and assets deployed is wide and growing. Building the infrastructure that Nscale has committed to, across multiple continents, at GPU densities that require bespoke facility design, is an execution problem of considerable complexity. The company's own published data centre pipeline and the Microsoft contract details that have been reported suggest it is making real progress. But significant infrastructure projects routinely fall behind schedule, and Nscale has not yet had a delivery cycle long enough to fully validate its operational model at the scale it is now targeting. The $2 billion will be used to accelerate global deployments, expand engineering and operations teams, and strengthen the platform. Nscale's IPO ambitions, which CEO Payne has previously flagged for as early as 2026, add another variable. Whether markets are ready to absorb a listing from a company this young, at this valuation, will depend on whether the compute economy continues to grow at the pace of the last two years, and whether Nscale can demonstrate that it is not just a capital vehicle but an operator.

European record $2bn Series C round for Nscale

The AI-native infrastructure platform provider has also appointed Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg and Susan Decker to its board of directors. UK-based AI infrastructure 'hyperscaler' Nscale is now valued at $14.6bn after raising $2bn in Series C funding. The funding round was led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries, and supported by Astra Capital Management, Dell, Jane Street, Linden Advisors, NVIDIA and others. Nscale has also appointed three new directors to its board: former Meta and Google executive Sheryl Sandberg, former UK deputy prime minister and Meta global affairs president Nick Clegg, and former Yahoo president Susan Decker. The Series C funding, which the company said is the largest such round in European history, will be used to accelerate its global development of vertically integrated AI infrastructure, including GPU compute, networking, data services and orchestration software, across Europe, North America and Asia. Josh Payne, the CEO and founder of the London-based AI infrastructure provider, described the current global AI boom as driving "the largest infrastructure buildout in human history", and said that over the next five years, AI would become "integrated into every industry, every product and every job". He added: "Nscale is leading this buildout. We are building this foundation that the market sits on, the engine of superintelligence." Nscale is an AI-native infrastructure platform provider offering vertically integrated compute, networking, storage, managed software and AI services via Nscale-owned and co-located data centres. Rayyan Islam of investor 8090 Industries said that the "limiting factor" in "a new era defined by AI" is infrastructure. He added: "Nscale has built a platform uniquely capable of solving this challenge by vertically integrating the critical layers of AI infrastructure -- from energy and data centers to compute and orchestration." Nscale has existing deals with Microsoft around infrastructure for European and US data centres. The current Series C funding was preceded by a $433m SAFE round last October and Europe's largest ever Series B funding roundthe month before. 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.

Nvidia-backed Nscale valued at $14.6 billion in fresh funding round

March 9 (Reuters) - Nvidia-backed artificial intelligence group Nscale was valued at $14.6 billion after raising $2 billion in its latest funding round, the British company said on Monday. The Series C funding round was led by Norway's Aker and 8090 Industries, and included Nvidia, Citadel, Dell, Jane Street, among others, the firm said in a statement. Former Meta executives Nick Clegg and Sheryl Sandberg, and former Yahoo President Susan Decker will join the board of the AI firm, the company said. The funding round comes ahead of the AI group's preparations for an initial public offering, for which Nscale Global has hired Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan as underwriters, sources told Reuters earlier this year. The timeline for the potential listing has not yet been set, the sources had said. Founded in 2024, Nscale owns and operates its own data centres, graphic processing units (GPUs), and software stack to deliver large-scale, GPU-powered AI compute. The new funding will help it expand its data-centre capacity to meet soaring demand for AI computing from customers, including Microsoft and OpenAI. (Reporting by Ruchika Khanna in Bengaluru; Editing by Harikrishnan Nair)