Nscale secures $790M financing to underscore commitment to Norway data centre

Nscale, the UK AI infrastructure startup backed by Nvidia, has secured a fresh $790m in debt financing geared towards the development of an AI data centre in Norway, where OpenAI had planned to house its ambitious Stargate Norway project.

The debt financing comes from Dutch multinational bank ABN AMRO, Norwegian bank DNB, along with Eksfin, Nordea, and SEB. The funding will go towards the AI infrastructure buildout of Nscale's data centre in Narvik, northern Norway.

The data centre was previously earmarked to house OpenAI’s ambitious Stargate Norway AI data centre project.

But instead, Nscale has signed a deal with existing customer Microsoft, which will rent Nvidia chips from Nscale at the site, after it was reported that OpenAI and Nscale failed to land a deal. Microsoft has an existing multi-billion contract at the data centre site.

Nscale said it had also inked a provision for an extra $790 million of financing by way of a so-called accordion feature, which would allow it extra funding without the need to renegotiate loan terms.

Earlier this year, Nscale was valued at $14.6bn following a $2bn Series C funding round. Josh Payne, founder and CEO of Nscale said: “Together, these developments position Nscale at the forefront of global AI infrastructure, delivering scalable, high-performance capacity to meet rapidly growing demand for our services.”