British AI datacentre firm Nscale raises $2bn as Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg join board

Nscale, a UK company vital to the government’s AI ambitions, has raised $2bn (£1.5bn) in a funding round and appointed the former Meta executives Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg to its board of directors.It brings the valuation of the London-based startup, which is backed by the US tech company Nvidia, to $14.6bn, it said in a statement, and follows a $1.1bn funding round the company raised last September.Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, “brings deep expertise at the intersection of technology, policy, and global affairs”, the company said, and is “at the centre of the most consequential regulatory and governance conversations shaping the future of AI”.Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta, brings “unmatched experience in scaling the world’s most influential technology companies”, it said.Nscale is set to contribute to Stargate UK, a huge infrastructure partnership announced last year that will involve the participation of OpenAI and Nvidia.It is also set to build a supercomputer in Loughton, part of a government drive to “mainline AI” into the economy of the UK. That supercomputer is set to come online later this year, according to the government and Nscale.“The success of UK-based Nscale shows how firms are seizing this opportunity to invest, expand and create jobs in this country,” the technologysecretary, Liz Kendall, said in a statement.“We have Europe’s leading AI ecosystem, and this news further underlines the growing international confidence in the UK as the natural home of AI innovation.”Nscale was spun out of the Australian bitcoin mining company Arkon energy in 2024. Its website touts datacentres across the US and Europe, including the UK, Portugal, Norway and Iceland.However, most of these do not appear to be datacentres Nscale itself has built; its flagship project in Norway, Glomfjord, was originally developed by the Norwegian company Hydrokraft.Nscale’s UK investments are part of a global blitz of AI deal-making announced last year, as governments and mostly US tech firms appeared to commit massive sums of money to building out vast datacentre infrastructure and fundamentally remaking the global economy.The UK government last September said that US tech companies would commit £31bn to building the UK’s AI infrastructure. In the US, OpenAI said it would commit $500bn to building AI infrastructure as a part of the Stargate project, with the participation of Oracle and SoftBank.Nvidia announced a spate of AI deals, including sovereign agreements as well as a £500m investment in Nscale and a $100bn investment in OpenAI, which was to go mostly towards the purchase of its own chips.Cracks are appearing in some of the promises. Nvidia’s $100bn deal with OpenAI melted away in early February. Oracle and OpenAI said last week that they were scrapping plans to extend a datacentre in Abilene, Texas, that is a vital part of OpenAI’s Stargate US project.