Nscale Secures Massive $14 Billion AI Infrastructure Deal with Microsoft, Eyes IPO

Nscale inks massive AI infrastructure deal with Microsoft | TechCrunch

AI hyperscaler startup Nscale has signed a sizable deal with Microsoft to bring Nvidia AI hardware to multiple data centers. The AI cloud provider announced that it signed a deal with Microsoft to bring approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs to three data centers in Europe and one in the U.S. on Wednesday. These GPUs will be delivered through Nscale-owned operations and through a joint venture with investment company Aker, one of Nscale's investors. About half of these GPUs, 104,000, will head to a data center in Texas leased by Ionic Digital, over the next 12 to 18 months. Nscale plans to increase its footprint at this location to 1.2 gigawatts, the company stated. Nscale will also deploy 12,600 GPUs to the Start Campus data center in Sines, Portugal, starting in the first quarter of 2026. The deal builds on previous plans with both Microsoft and Aker regarding data centers in Norway and the United Kingdom. Nscale will send 23,000 GPUS to its Loughton, England campus starting in 2027, and send the remaining 52,000 GPUs to Microsoft's AI campus in Narvik, Norway. "This agreement confirms Nscale's place as a partner of choice for the world's most important technology leaders," Josh Payne, founder and CEO of Nscale, said in a company press release. "Few companies are equipped to deliver GPU deployments at this scale, but we have the experience and have built the global pipeline to do so." It's a bold claim by Payne, considering that Nscale was founded in 2024. Since its launch, the company has raised more than $1.7 billion from strategic partners including Aker, Nokia and Nvidia. Nscale has also raised from investors like Sandton Capital Partners, G Squared and Point72, among others. Payne told the Financial Times that the company is looking at an IPO as early as the end of next year. "The pace with which we have expanded our capacity demonstrates both our readiness and our commitment to efficiency, sustainability and providing our customers with the most advanced technology available. It's a clear signal that Nscale is setting a new standard for how the next wave of AI infrastructure will be delivered," Payne said in the release. GPU deals have picked up in recent weeks. OpenAI announced it was purchasing six gigawatts worth of chips from AMD last week. OpenAI also recently inked a deal with Nvidia in which Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in the company in exchange for 10 gigawatts worth of chips in September.

UK data centre start-up Nscale strikes $14bn Microsoft deal in push for IPO

Nvidia-backed cloud provider Nscale has struck a deal with Microsoft worth up to $14bn, in a boost to the UK-based start-up's hopes of launching a successful initial public offering as soon as next year. The companies announced on Wednesday that Nscale will deploy about 104,000 of the latest Nvidia GB300 chips for Microsoft at a facility in Texas over the next 12-18 months. Nscale will also deliver another 12,600 graphics processing units (GPUs) for Microsoft at the Start Campus data centre in Portugal. The move builds on Nscale's deals last month with both Microsoft and OpenAI to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the UK and helps position the London-headquartered company for a stock market debut -- if it can complete construction of the facilities on time. "We have public market ambitions, and execution is an enormous focus of mine," Nscale chief executive Josh Payne told the Financial Times. He hoped to go public in the "back end of next year", he added. The deal is the latest indication that Big Tech companies are pushing ahead with construction of infrastructure for AI, despite growing concerns from investors that the market for it is starting to overheat. Spun out of an Australian Bitcoin miner and relaunched as an AI cloud provider just last year, Nscale has raised $1.5bn in new funding over the past month alone, valuing it at about $3bn. Nscale planned to close its next private financing "soon . . . simply due to overwhelming demand" from investors, Payne said. Nscale's new deals with Microsoft build on an existing contract valued at $6.2bn for Nscale to deploy 52,000 Nvidia GPUs for Microsoft at its facility in Norway. Nscale and Microsoft did not provide a figure for Wednesday's deals but based on a similar contract value per GPU, the new contracts would likely generate as much as $14bn in revenue for the start-up. Nscale's latest Microsoft contract is a huge undertaking for a company that has quickly become one of Europe's best-capitalised AI data centre providers. Its sudden rise has fuelled concern that Nvidia, the dominant supplier of AI chips, is using its formidable balance sheet to pump the biggest tech bubble since the dotcom boom. Last month, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said the chipmaker would invest £500mn in Nscale to accelerate its deployment of up to 300,000 of its GPUs, declaring it a "national champion for the UK". Huang said AI facilities running those chips could generate as much as £50bn in revenues over the next six years. "Nscale is going to be a very large UK technology company," Huang said. Nvidia's backing turned investor sentiment around on Nscale very rapidly, according to Spencer McLeod, partner at G Squared. "The inflection for this business transpired in two weeks," he said. "Suddenly everyone went from sitting on the fence to going all in." The Silicon Valley chipmaker is also investing in several companies that buy its GPUs -- from Nscale's cloud rivals CoreWeave and Nebius to OpenAI -- to accelerate a new generation of AI-focused data centres. Payne told the FT he had no concerns that the data centre market was overheating because it had "real hard asset value protecting your downside". "The larger chance we see a market slowdown is not going to be because of lack of demand, it's going to be because of lack of power," he said. "We've almost sold out our capacity for the next 12 months. And we would expect that to continue as we get into the next GPU cycle." As well as Nvidia, Nscale's strategic investors include server maker Dell and networking provider Nokia, as well as private investors such as Sandton Capital, G Squared, Fidelity and Blue Owl. Last month's $1.1bn financing was led by Aker, the Norwegian energy and industrial group that Nscale is already working with to build a data centre that will serve customers, including OpenAI, in Narvik in northern Norway. However, while Nscale has expanded its facility in Norway, it is yet to complete a new build from scratch. "Nscale is a young company, there's no question about that," said Payne. "However, the individuals that we have involved and the resources we have are [those] of a much more experienced company." Payne pointed to Alex Sharp, a data centre industry veteran who is now Nscale's chief operating officer, and David Power, chief technology officer, who has been building supercomputers for 20 years, as examples of the expertise that he has been able to recruit since publicly launching the business last year. Securing affordable and largely renewable sources of energy has been crucial to the young company winning such big contracts. The site in Texas, which Nscale is leasing from Bitcoin miner Ionic Digital, has 240MW of power today, sourced from the Texas grid. Microsoft had an option to add a further 700MW of capacity starting in late 2027, the two companies said. The campus could ultimately scale up to as much as 1.2GW, Payne said, similar to the computing capacity that OpenAI is building with its Stargate project with Oracle and Crusoe in the same state. 1GW of power consumption is as much energy as 1mn typical US households consume in a year. Jon Tinter, Microsoft's president of business development and ventures, said: "Nscale is an ideal partner for this mission, given its deep expertise in providing AI infrastructure services at scale." Plenty of chips from Nvidia and big contracts from Microsoft will also help Nscale raise the capital it needs to continue its growth. "This is a high capex intensity business," Payne said. "You're never not fundraising."

Nscale eyes IPO amid fresh $14 billion deal with Microsoft

AI cloud company Nscale is eyeing an IPO, the company confirmed to CNBC Wednesday as it announced a $14-billion deal with U.S. tech giant Microsoft. The London-based company, which provides technology infrastructure to help AI scale, has "public market ambitions" which could be realized in the "back end of next year," Chief Executive Josh Payne told the Financial Times on Wednesday. A company spokesperson declined to comment on where the company is considering listing. On Wednesday Nscale announced an "expanded partnership" with Microsoft, netting the younger company $14 billion, a figure first reported by the Financial Times and verified by CNBC. Microsoft will purchase around 200,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs from Nscale, inclusive of 75,000 GPUs for projects in Norway and the U.K. that were previously announced, putting the total deal worth at around $23 billion, according to CNBC calculations based on previous annoucements. A company spokesperson declined to comment on the value of the deals.

Nscale inks 200,000-GPU data center contract with Microsoft - SiliconANGLE

Startup Nscale Global Holdings Ltd will build four artificial intelligence data centers for Microsoft Corp. as part of a new contract announced today. The facilities are expected to host about 200,000 graphics processing units. According to CNBC and the Financial Times, the contract is worth up to $24 billion. Nscale is a London-based data center builder that spun out of Australian crypto mining company Arkon Energy Pty last year. It operates an AI facility (pictured) in Norway that is powered by 30 megawatts of hydroelectric power. Over the past two months, Nscale has raised more than $1.7 billion from Nvidia Corp. and other investors to grow its data center footprint. The company's new collaboration with Microsoft will see it launch data centers in four countries. Nscale plans to start building the first facility in the Portuguese town of Sines early next year. At full capacity, the data center will host about 12,600 GPUs. Nscale will start building a second, significantly larger facility in Texas during the third quarter of 2026. The campus will host about 104,000 GPUs, or nearly ten times more than the Sines site. Nscale's Texas data center will open its doors with an initial capacity of 240 megawatts. The company plans to increase that number to 1.2 gigawatts over time. Additionally, Microsoft will receive the option to add another 700 megawatts of AI capacity from the first quarter of 2027 onwards. The remaining 75,000 GPUs that Nscale plans to operate for Microsoft will be deployed as part of two previously announced data center projects. According to the company, the first facility will be located in the UK. Nscale plans to build the second site a few hour's drive from its existing data center in Norway. All four facilities will use Nvidia's top of the line Blackwell Ultra graphics card. The chip can provide 15 petaflops of inference performance, a 50% increase over its predecessor. Nvidia is promising an even bigger speedup for attention layers, the software components that language models use to identify the most important details in user prompts. The Blackwell Ultra comprises 160 compute modules called SMs. Each SM, in turn, includes 132 cores. Four of those cores are optimized to run small units of data such as FP6 and FP8 numbers, while the others support a broader range of data types. Each SM includes 256 kilobytes of integrated memory optimized to store AI output. Nscale plans to deploy the Blackwell Ultra as part of GB300 NVL72 appliances. The Nvidia-developed systems each contain 72 Blackwell Ultra chips, 36 central processing units and networking equipment. They use liquid cooling to dissipate heat. The GB300 NVL72 has also been adopted by CoreWeave Inc., a Nasdaq-traded Nscale competitor. The company operates a public cloud platform optimized to run AI workloads. Last month, CoreWeave inked two multibillion-dollar data center deals with Meta Platforms Inc. and OpenAI. Nscale Chief Executive Josh Payne told the Financial Times today that the company plans to go public. According to the paper, the data center builder could list its shares in the second half of 2026.

Microsoft And Nvidia-Backed Nscale Announce Large-Scale AI Project In US And Europe - Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Nscale unveiled an expanded partnership with Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) to deploy roughly 200,000 NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) GB300 GPUs across Europe and the United States, marking an important AI infrastructure rollout. The multi-country build, announced in London, leverages Nscale's sites and its joint venture with Aker ASA, as well as collaboration with Dell Technologies Inc. (NYSE:DELL) on the effort. The program spans four countries on two continents to deliver hyperscale NVIDIA AI capacity for Microsoft's customers. Also Read: Nvidia, AMD, Marvell, Taiwan Semiconductor Surge After Friday Dip On Trump's China Remarks, OpenAI-Broadcom AI Chip Deal Initial phases are scheduled to start in 2026, with staged deliveries that pair new greenfield development and colocation footprints. The plan also reinforces earlier commitments by Nscale and Microsoft to stand up the United Kingdom's largest NVIDIA-powered supercomputer. Nscale targets approximately 104,000 GB300 GPUs at a 240MW AI campus in Texas, leased from Ionic Digital, with services for Microsoft set to begin in the third quarter of 2026. Nscale intends to expand the site to 1.2GW over time. Microsoft holds an option for a second phase of roughly 700MW beginning in late 2027, subject to future milestones and demand. From the first quarter of 2026, Nscale plans to stand up approximately 12,600 GB300 GPUs at the Start Campus facility in Sines, Portugal, offering EU-based customers sovereign AI solutions. In the U.K., Nscale's Loughton AI Campus is slated to host approximately 23,000 GB300 GPUs from early 2027 in a 50MW installation that is scalable to 90MW. Separately, the Aker-Nscale joint venture in Narvik, Norway, is expected to deliver approximately 52,000 GB300 GPUs to Microsoft under a multi-year agreement. "Nscale is proud to partner with Microsoft on this historic AI infrastructure contract," said founder and CEO Josh Payne. Microsoft's president of Business Development and Ventures Jon Tinter added, "Together with Nscale, Microsoft is delivering cutting-edge AI infrastructure for our customers." The arrangement highlights the growing demand for high-performance computing among enterprises to train, fine-tune, and run AI models at a global scale. Nscale, a vertically integrated AI cloud provider, says its facilities, orchestration stack and services are engineered to deliver sovereign-grade, sustainable capacity as next-generation workloads accelerate across regions. NVDA Price Action: NVDA shares were trading higher by 2.26% to $184.09 premarket at last check Wednesday. MSFT shares were up by 0.24% to $514.81 premarket at the time of publication. Read Next: Taiwan Semiconductor Stock Rebounds As AI Hype Overpowers China Tensions Photo: Shutterstock MSFTMicrosoft Corp$516.090.49%OverviewNVDANVIDIA Corp$184.942.73%DELLDell Technologies Inc$152.012.18%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

UK's Nscale to supply Microsoft with 200,000 Nvidia AI chips

(Reuters) -British artificial intelligence group Nscale has signed an expanded agreement with Microsoft to deploy around 200,000 Nvidia AI chips across its data centers in Europe and the United States, it said on Wednesday. While Nscale did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement, the Financial Times, based on a comparable contract, reported that the deal could bring in up to $14 billion in revenue for the start-up. The deal will be executed in collaboration with Dell Technologies, Nscale said. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Nscale will begin supplying Nvidia graphics processing units to Microsoft via its data centers in Texas and Portugal starting next year. The company also plans to expand its Texas operations over the coming years. The agreement builds on earlier plans announced by Nscale. It said its joint venture with Norway's Aker has signed a multi-year deal to supply Microsoft with around 52,000 Nvidia GPUs from its hyperscale AI campus in Narvik, Norway. The start-up in September raised $1.1 billion from investors, including Aker and Finland's Nokia, to help accelerate its data centre buildout. (Reporting by Disha Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Harikrishnan Nair)

Nvidia-Backed Startup Nscale, Microsoft Strike AI Infrastructure Deal

Nscale Global Holdings said it reached an agreement with Microsoft to roll out artificial-intelligence infrastructure in the U.S. and Europe, the latest partnership for the startup after weeks of dealmaking. The U.K.-based company said Wednesday that it would deploy roughly 104,000 Nvidia GB300 graphics processing units at an AI campus in Texas and about 12,600 Nvidia GB300 GPUs at a data center in Sines, Portugal. The deal is aimed at delivering Nvidia AI infrastructure services for Microsoft. Nscale didn't disclose financial details for the agreement, which it described as one of the largest AI infrastructure contracts ever signed. The company, which owns data centers that provide the networking, storage and computing needed to power AI, has struck several partnerships in recent weeks, including with ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Last month, Nscale said it would roll out AI infrastructure in the U.K with Nvidia and OpenAI as part of a project dubbed Stargate U.K. The company also said it plans to develop the U.K.'s largest AI supercomputer with Microsoft. In July, Nscale said it was partnering with Norwegian industrial group Aker and OpenAI to set up Stargate Norway, a data-center project in northern Norway that is expected to house 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. The latest agreement with Microsoft comes weeks after Nscale closed a $1.1 billion Series B funding round that it said was the largest in European history. Nvidia, Dell Technologies, Nokia have injected funds into the startup. News Corp, owner of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.