U.K.-based AI infrastructure company Nscale has raised $2 billion in a Series C round, marking the largest funding round of its kind in European history. The round was led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries, and values Nscale at $14.6 billion.
The round drew a wide field of institutional and strategic backers. Astra Capital Management, Citadel, Dell, Jane Street, Lenovo, Linden Advisors, Nokia, NVIDIA, and Point72 all participated. Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan acted as joint placement agents for the raise, which includes a Pre-Series C SAFE.
The global push to deploy AI at scale is running into a concrete bottleneck: not demand, but the ability to build and operate infrastructure reliably. Nscale was designed specifically to address that gap, offering vertically integrated AI infrastructure spanning GPU compute, networking, data services, and orchestration software across Europe, North America, and Asia.
"Over the next 5 years, Artificial Intelligence will be integrated into every industry, every product, and every job," said Josh Payne, CEO and Founder of Nscale. "This is leading to the largest infrastructure buildout in human history. Nscale is building the foundation that the market sits on."
The new capital will accelerate Nscale's global infrastructure deployments, deepen its engineering and operations teams, and expand its data center footprint across existing and new markets. The company's model, built on modular first-principles data center design, is intended to scale quickly while keeping delivery practical and production-ready.
Beyond physical infrastructure, Nscale's roadmap points toward continued development of its orchestration software layer, which sits atop the hardware stack and enables enterprise clients to run AI training, fine-tuning, and inference workloads at scale. The combination of owned infrastructure and software control is central to its positioning in an increasingly competitive market.
Founded by Josh Payne, Nscale operates as a hyperscaler purpose-built for AI workloads. Unlike general cloud providers, it focuses entirely on vertically integrated AI infrastructure, a model that lets it control quality and performance end to end. The company has expanded its footprint across Europe, North America, and Asia, with a firm commitment to waste heat reuse, local skills development, and regional infrastructure investment.
As part of this funding announcement, Nscale also confirmed the full integration of the Aker Nscale joint venture, originally announced in July 2025, into Nscale's core operations. The consolidation puts all delivery and governance under a single entity while keeping existing projects fully operational.
"This step strengthens execution by putting delivery and governance under one roof, while keeping continuity for the people and projects already underway," said Øyvind Eriksen, President and CEO of Aker ASA.
Alongside the funding, Nscale announced that Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker, and Nick Clegg have joined its Board of Directors.
Sandberg, co-founder of Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners and former COO of Meta, brings experience scaling some of the most widely used technology platforms in the world. Decker is CEO and co-founder of university platform Raftr and a former President of Yahoo, currently serving on the boards of Costco, Berkshire Hathaway, Vail Resorts, Chime, Vox Media, and Automattic. Clegg, a General Partner at Hiro Capital and former UK Deputy Prime Minister, previously served as President of Global Affairs at Meta and has been central to major AI regulatory and governance conversations across both the UK and European parliaments.
The three new directors join an existing board that includes Josh Payne, Rael Nurick, Jacob Leschly, and Øyvind Eriksen.
The Series C was led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries, with participation from Astra Capital Management, Citadel, Dell, Jane Street, Lenovo, Linden Advisors, Nokia, NVIDIA, and Point72. Aker, already a strategic partner through the joint venture announced in July 2025, becomes a leading shareholder in Nscale following this round.
"The limiting factor is infrastructure," said Rayyan Islam, Co-founder and General Partner of 8090 Industries. "Compute, energy, and industrial-scale deployment capacity will determine which nations and companies lead the next generation of technological and economic progress. Nscale has built a platform uniquely capable of solving this challenge."
