NScale
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NScale is a London-based AI datacentre company founded in 2024 by Joshua Payne.
NScale began as an offshoot of Arkon Energy as a provider of infrastructure for crypto mining, according to the Financial Times.[1] Arkon was based in Melbourne, and Joshua Payne is Australian.[2] The FT reported that "Nscale was born (from “stealth mode”) out of Arkon Energy, a Melbourne, Australia-based crypto miner following a $155mn Series A funding round in December 2024. At the same time, Nscale’s bitcoin mining operations were being wound down."[3]
NScale's Series B investment round in 2025 raised $1.1 billion from companies like "Aker, the Norwegian industrial investment company, with additional participation from a raft of firms including NVIDIA, Nokia and Dell".[4]
In March 2026, NScale raised $2bn and former Meta executives Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg join its board.[1] The company has now achieved a valuation of $14.6 billion according to The Times[5]. The Times reported that NVIDIA cofounder Jensen Huang said that by the end of 2026 “we’ll probably have 300,000 GPUs [AI chips] put online with Nscale … we’re going to have a technology company in the UK over the next six years or so … that scales up to £50 billion”.[5]
While NScale boasts of involvement with 50 data centres, according to The Times, "Only 11 are listed on its website and the first data centre of its own, in Loughton, Essex, is scheduled to be available in the first three months of 2027, a slight slip from the “Q4 2026” it had previously predicted."[5]
NScale has a partnership with Microsoft to supply the tech firm with 200,000 NVIDIA chips.[6] The company is working with other US tech firms like Open AI and NVIDIA to create "a U.K. version of Stargate — a massive AI infrastructure scheme — with its first data centers slated to be located on the site of a former coal power station in Northumberland, north-east England."[7]
NScale is also expanding into the US market with its acquisition of the Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia.[8]