British startup Nscale, spun out from a crypto-mining operation in 2024, has become one of Europe’s best-funded AI infrastructure players, raising nearly $4 billion from investors including Dell, Nokia, and Nvidia before closing a $2 billion Series C round valuing the company at $14.6 billion. The firm builds and operates data centers powered by renewable energy, primarily in Norway and the UK, renting their computing power to AI companies, in a context where the European Union holds less than 5% of global AI computing capacity compared to 75% for the United States. The Stargate project, in which Nscale was participating alongside OpenAI in the UK and Norway, has partially unraveled, with OpenAI suspending its UK plans and abandoning its Norwegian deployment, as Microsoft and Google took over the planned capacity. Nscale’s public accounts show a $24 million loss over seven months, and its planned AI « supercomputer » project in Loughton, England, has been delayed to 2027, while concerns grow over energy consumption and access to Europe’s power grid.
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