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Nvidia-backed AI cloud provider Nscale has raised $2bn in the largest deal of its kind for a European tech start-up, as former Meta executives Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg join its board.
The deal for UK-headquartered Nscale values the two-year-old company at $14.6bn, including the fresh capital raised. Its funding round was led by Aker ASA, the Norwegian industrial group it is working with to build a data centre for customers including OpenAI, and 8090 Industries, a New York-based venture firm.
The financing is the largest-ever Series C funding round for a European start-up, according to Dealroom, surpassing French AI company Mistral’s €1.7bn round led by Dutch chip equipment maker ASML in September. Series C rounds are typically the fourth stage of start-up financing and can sometimes be the final fundraise before going public.
Nscale’s fundraising is the latest sign of sustained investor enthusiasm for AI infrastructure projects. It comes despite Wall Street concerns about the impact of the technology, as well as disruption to energy and semiconductor supply chains caused by the Middle East conflict.
Nscale also announced on Monday that former Meta chief operating officer Sandberg would join its board alongside ex-UK deputy prime minister Clegg, who stepped down as the social media company’s president of global affairs last year.
Clegg told the FT on Monday: “If you want the world generally to participate in this technology, it’s a good thing to have players who are not just China and [US] West Coast-based.”
Susan Decker, a former Yahoo executive who serves on the boards of Berkshire Hathaway and Costco Wholesale, was also appointed to Nscale’s directors.
Nscale was spun out of the Australian bitcoin mining infrastructure group Arkon Energy in 2024 and has grown rapidly, driven by booming demand for AI infrastructure — primarily from US Big Tech groups — that has also propelled upstart cloud providers such as CoreWeave, Crusoe and Nebius.
Monday’s deal follows Nscale’s $1.1bn financing in September. The following month it won a contract worth up to $14bn with Microsoft to build a large AI data centre in Texas.
Last month, Nscale secured a further $1.4bn in debt, backed by its growing stockpile of Nvidia GPUs, from investors including funds managed by Blue Owl and LuminArx, which have backed several AI data centre ventures.
However, shares in Blue Owl have lost about a fifth of their value over the past month. Those falls came amid concerns over its lending to software companies that face disruption from AI, anxiety about its multibillion-dollar data-centre projects with Meta and CoreWeave, as well as its exposure to a collapsed UK property firm.
“Britain has no shortage of ambitious companies ready to scale and Nscale’s historic raise shows the strength of the UK’s AI ecosystem and the confidence global investors have in it,” said UK business secretary Peter Kyle.
