A crypto miner's power contracts become an AI cloud
Before Nscale, Josh Payne ran Arkon Energy, a bitcoin mining operation that chased cheap, renewable power: hydroelectric sites in Glomfjord, Norway, and stranded-power deals in Ohio, run out of Sydney. Arkon lost $102 million on $19 million of revenue. When crypto mining stopped paying, Payne noticed that the same cheap power, cooling and connectivity that made a good mining site also made a good AI data center site, and redirected the contracts toward GPUs instead of mining rigs rather than winding the business down. [3][4]
Arkon raised $110 million at the end of 2023 to fund the pivot, and Payne incorporated Nscale as a separate, London-headquartered company in May 2024 to raise European capital and draw on government support. Companies House lists its incorporation date as May 29, 2024. Nscale now describes itself as a full-stack AI infrastructure provider: GPU cloud and managed inference on top, data centers and power underneath, with facilities or partner sites in Norway, the UK, the US, Portugal and Iceland. [1][5]
Funding that tracks the buildout
Nscale's raises have scaled with the size of the data centers it is committing to build. It closed a $1.1 billion Series B in September 2025, led by Aker ASA with Nvidia, Nokia, Dell, Fidelity and others participating, which it called the largest Series B in European history. In March 2026 it closed a $2 billion Series C, also led by Aker, valuing the company at $14.6 billion and again billed as Europe's largest capital raise. Nvidia has invested in successive rounds while also supplying the GPUs Nscale buys with that capital, a supplier-and-investor role Nvidia plays with several infrastructure builders it backs. [6][7]
The largest single project is a data center campus above the Arctic Circle in Narvik, Norway, whose first phase alone is expected to draw about 230 megawatts, close to the combined draw of every other data center in the country. It was announced as Stargate Norway, an OpenAI-branded project with Aker; by April 2026, OpenAI had not signed a binding contract for the capacity, and Nscale named Microsoft the anchor tenant instead, with OpenAI renting the site as Microsoft's customer under its existing Azure agreement. Nscale separately supplies GPU capacity to Microsoft Azure from a UK campus in Loughton. [4]
The Anthropic deal
In August 2026, Anthropic committed $45 billion to a Nscale campus planned for West Virginia, called Monarch. It is Anthropic's largest compute commitment to date and one of the largest single infrastructure deals in the timeline, and it makes Anthropic, rather than a big cloud provider, Nscale's marquee customer for the site. [2]
Atlas interpretation: The deal fits the pattern set by Stargate Norway: Nscale sells long-term capacity commitments to a frontier lab or its cloud partner before a site is finished, and uses the commitment to raise the capital and secure the power contracts to build it. Anthropic gets compute outside Amazon and Google, its two other major suppliers, without owning the data center itself; Nscale gets a customer large enough to justify a campus the size of Monarch. [2][4]
Sources
- NSCALE GLOBAL HOLDINGS LIMITED - Filing history
Companies House · retrieved Sep 2, 2026
- Anthropic to Pay Nscale $45 Billion for Computing
Bloomberg · Aug 26, 2026
- Nscale & NVIDIA: How GPUs Became AI's Reserve Currency
Turing Post · Nov 8, 2025
- Inside Nscale's Massive AI Data Center Above the Arctic Circle
Time · Jun 4, 2026
- Nscale
Nscale · retrieved Sep 9, 2026
- Nscale Raises the Largest Series B in European History, at $1.1 billion
Nscale · Sep 25, 2025
- Nscale Raises $2 Billion in Series C
Nscale · Mar 9, 2026