UK’s Nscale secures $1.1B in Series B funding led by Aker

Nscale, a UK-based artificial intelligence company, has landed a massive Nvidia-backed funding.

The company announced on Thursday that it has raised $1.1 billion from investors in a series B funding round. The deal was led by Aker, a major Norwegian investment firm, with help from well-known tech companies Nokia, Nvidia, and Dell.

This funding shows just how much demand there is for robust computing infrastructure required to run and train AI models from companies like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. 

Josh Payne, the co-founder and CEO of Nscale, says they’re building one of the world’s largest computing networks, built specifically to handle the exploding demand for AI services.

“This allows Nscale to provide our customers access to scarce, and highly sought after, compute capacity and rapidly accelerate the build-out of secure, compliant and energy-efficient AI infrastructure,” Payne added.

Arkon used to mine cryptocurrency in Australia, but they saw the increasing demand for data centers that could handle complex AI tasks. Eventually in 2023, Nscale broke off from Arkon Energy.

The company has become crucial to Britain’s goal of becoming a world leader in artificial intelligence. Last week alone, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI announced they’re pumping billions into projects with Nscale to build computing power across the UK.

Nscale fuels AI growth with $1B data centers

Currently, Nscale is working with OpenAI to set up data centers in both Britain and Norway. This is all part of OpenAI’s massive Stargate project. Some of that $1.1 billion will go toward getting these European facilities up and running quickly.

The Norway project is getting a full $1 billion investment. The plan is to pack 100,000 of Nvidia’s specialized GPUs into that site before 2027. Over in the UK, they’re starting smaller with 8,000 chips early next year, but they could eventually expand that to around 31,000 chips.

While all this is happening, people on Wall Street are getting excited about how AI might help America’s biggest retail chains. Alex Straton, who analyzes companies for Morgan Stanley, said in a note that smart AI systems could save these retailers about $6 billion total.

Straton thinks these savings could make company profits 20% higher by 2026. He came up with this by looking at how AI might cut operating costs and keeping track of how much retailers actually talk about AI when they report their earnings.

The $6 billion per year would come from AI handling things like figuring out what inventory to order, automating supply chains, and running customer service without human help. If Straton is right, retail profit margins could go up by about 200 basis points.

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