Nscale Global Holdings Ltd., a London-based data center startup, today announced that it has raised $2 billion in funding.

The Series C round was jointly led by Norwegian energy company Aker ASA and 8090 Industries. They were joined by Nvidia Corp., Dell Technologies Inc., Nokia Corp. and several others. Nscale is now valued at $14.6 billion, which is reportedly more than double what it was worth last September.

Nscale is building a data center network optimized to run artificial intelligence workloads. Since launching less than two years ago, the company has announced plans to open facilities in the US, the U.K., Norway, Iceland and Portugal. Those data centers are expected to provide several gigabytes of computing capacity when they come online.

Nscale’s facility in Portugal uses seawater to regulate the temperature of the servers that it hosts. Its Texas data center, in turn, features a closed-loop liquid cooling system. Such systems reuse their coolant to reduce the amount of freshwater required by the host facility.

One of Nscale’s largest projects is a planned data center in Norway that it’s building for OpenAI Group PBC. Stargate Norway, as the facility is called, will be equipped with 100,000 graphics processing units by year’s end. It’s expected to provide 230 megawatts of initial computing capacity.

Stargate Norway launched last July as a joint venture between Nscale and Aker, the energy company that co-led its latest funding round. In a joint announcement issued at the time, they pledged to spend about $1 billion on the project. The companies stated today that the joint venture will be folded “fully into Nscale.”

A few months after announcing Stargate Norway last year, Nscale inked an even larger infrastructure deal with Microsoft Corp. The $14.6 billion partnership will see it host 200,000 of Nvidia’s GB300 accelerators for the tech giant. Just over half the chips will run in Nscale’s Texas data center, while the others will be installed in the UK and Portugal.

Nscale offers a growing lineup of software tools to its infrastructure customers. An application called Control Center automates tasks such as scaling graphics card clusters when user demand grows. Additionally, the startup offers a managed Kubernetes service that removes the need for developers to manually install and maintain the framework.

The company will use the proceeds from its funding round to build more infrastructure. Nscale plans to extend its cloud to Asia, where it does not yet operate data centers, as well as expand its existing presence in North America and Europe.

The investment should also make it easier for Nscale to pursue inorganic growth. The company inked its first acquisition, the purchase of British engineering firm Future-tech, this past December. The deal saw Nscale gain a team of about 60 data center design and facility management professionals. 

Photo: Nscale