Nscale raises $2 billion Series C at $14.6 billion valuation

British AI infrastructure company Nscale has secured a $2 billion Series C—a late-stage funding round—valuing the company at $14.6 billion. This valuation establishes Nscale as a decacorn, a term for a startup valued over $10 billion. The funding round includes a $433 million pre-Series C SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) raised in October. Alongside the capital injection, Nscale has appointed several new members to its board of directors, including former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, former Yahoo president Susan Decker, and former U.K. deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.

The company is scaling its infrastructure footprint through “Stargate Norway,” a Norway-based AI infrastructure project that was previously a joint venture with Norwegian energy company Aker. Under a new agreement, the project will be fully managed by Nscale. Stargate Norway has the ambition to run on 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2026, with OpenAI as an initial customer. Øyvind Eriksen, Aker president and CEO and an Nscale board member, stated that “this step strengthens execution by putting delivery and governance under one roof, while keeping continuity for the people and projects already underway.” Additionally, Nscale signed an expanded deal in October with Microsoft to bring approximately 200,000 Nvidia GPUs to three data centers in Europe and one in the U.S., in collaboration with Dell.

The late-stage round follows a $1.1 billion Series B round in September, which was backed by Aker. To finance some of its clusters across Europe, Nscale also raised debt last month through a $1.4 billion delayed draw term loan—a type of debt financing—backed by GPUs. The company’s investors and partners across its funding rounds include:

• Financial institutions: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Blue Owl, Citadel, Jane Street, Linden Advisors, and Point72
• Technology and strategic partners: Nvidia, Dell, Nokia, Lenovo, and Astra Capital

With support from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, Nscale is positioning itself for a potential public debut. CEO Josh Payne told The New York Times that the company might seek to go public as early as this year to generate more capital.

Why it matters

Nscale is betting on vertical integration—controlling everything from energy and data centers to compute and orchestration software—to capture the massive, rising enterprise demand for AI infrastructure.