Nscale Secures $155M in Series A Funding to Drive Innovation

Nscale, a hyperscaler designed specifically for AI applications, has successfully raised $155 million (€146.4m) in an oversubscribed Series A funding round. Led by Sandton Capital Partners, the round also saw participation from Kestrel, Bluesky Asset Management, and Florence Capital. The funds will be used to fuel Nscale’s expansion across Europe and North America.

Nscale specializes in creating sustainable, AI-ready data centers, building massive-scale GPU infrastructure, and offering high-performance AI cloud services. With its full-stack approach, Nscale co-designs data centers and GPU supercluster infrastructure to optimize speed, performance, and efficiency for AI workloads. The company’s AI private cloud platform supports the entire generative AI lifecycle, offering bare metal and virtualized GPU nodes, Kubernetes-native services (NKS), SLURM-powered AI workload scheduling, as well as advanced serverless and dedicated inferencing options.

Additionally, Nscale plans to launch a public cloud service in Q1 2025. This service will provide developers with access to purpose-built inference and training solutions within a flexible development environment.

Since emerging from stealth in May 2024, Nscale has experienced skyrocketing demand for its AI infrastructure. The company’s pipeline of greenfield data centers across Europe and North America has grown from 300MW to 1.3GW, with 120MW of capacity scheduled for 2025 development. These facilities are being designed to support large-scale supercluster deployments for global hyperscalers and large language model (LLM) platforms, utilizing closed-loop direct liquid cooling to maximize performance and efficiency while reducing environmental impact.

With its unique vertically integrated approach, Nscale is positioned to address the growing market demand for large-scale AI infrastructure. The company’s end-to-end design and deployment capabilities enable it to deliver GPU clusters of any scale to governments, AI startups, and global enterprises.

“The AI market is scaling rapidly, and so are we,” said Joshua Payne, CEO of Nscale. “We manage every layer of infrastructure to meet the needs of large-scale AI customers. The greatest challenge in scaling the AI market is the massive energy requirements for GPU superclusters. Our 1.3GW site pipeline allows us to design data centers and superclusters from the ground up, enabling us to deliver bespoke, sustainable, and cost-effective AI infrastructure at any scale. This funding allows us to serve more customers globally, unlocking new AI capabilities, products, and services.”

Rael Nurick, Co-Founder at Sandton Capital Partners, shared his excitement about leading the Series A round: “Nscale’s innovative approach, industry partnerships, and proven track record make them uniquely positioned to power enterprise AI at scale. We’re thrilled to deepen our investment in their mission to build the infrastructure for the AI era.”

This funding follows Nscale’s $30 million seed round in December 2023. The company also recently partnered with Open Innovation AI, a leading GPU orchestration platform in the MENA region, to deploy 30,000 GPUs over the next three years.