Data center startup Nscale Global Holdings Ltd. today announced that it has raised $1.1 billion in funding to grow its infrastructure footprint.

Norwegian investment firm Aker ASA led the Series B round. It was joined by Nvidia Corp., Dell Technologies Inc., Nokia Corp. and several other backers.

“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,” said Chief Executive Josh Payne.

Nscale builds data centers optimized for artificial intelligence workloads. The company uses Nvidia graphics processing units and Kubernetes to power its infrastructure. It also provides access to Slurm, an open-source Kubernetes alternative that is often used to train large language models. Developers use the technology because it facilitates high server utilization, which reduces unnecessary hardware costs.

Nscale offers bare-metal clusters for customers with more advanced requirements. Those clusters don’t include Kubernetes or other preinstalled software, which makes it possible to customize them for specific workloads. Meanwhile, customers who don’t wish to manually configure infrastructure have access to a serverless inference service.

Nscale operates a 30-megawatt data center (pictured) in Glomfjord, a Norwegian town located inside the Arctic Circle. In June, it inked a deal to build a second Norwegian data center for OpenAI. The facility is expected to use 520 megawatts of power, over 10 times more than Nscale’s first facility, and will host 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards.

OpenAI won’t be the data center’s sole user. Last week, Microsoft Corp. signed a contract to rent some of the AI infrastructure installed in the facility. The five-year agreement is worth $6.2 billion. The data center will be owned by a joint venture between Nscale and Aker, the investment firm that led its newly announced funding round.

The startup is also building data center infrastructure in the U.K. It will help OpenAI deploy an AI cluster called Stargate U.K. that will be equipped with 8,000 graphics cards in the first quarter of 2026. Over time, OpenAI and Nscale hope to add as many as 23,000 additional GPUs.

Nscale will use its newly raised capital to finance data center construction. The company plans to power some of the upcoming AI clusters with hardware from Dell, one of the tech firms that backed its funding round. Nscale will hire more engineering and operations professionals to support the effort.

The other focus of the company’s growth push is its portfolio of cloud services. Nscale plans to launch a fine-tuning service for customizing open-source AI models. Additionally, the company is building a tool that can compare neural networks’ performance to help developers find the most suitable algorithm for their applications. 

Photo: Nscale