Sandberg, Clegg join Nscale board as this ‘Stargate Norway’ startup hits $14.6B valuation

Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure company backed by Nvidia, has catapulted to a $14.6 billion valuation following a massive $2 billion Series C funding round. The company touts this as the largest private funding round in European history. The capital injection, supported by Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, is widely seen as preparation for a potential IPO, with CEO Josh Payne suggesting a public listing could happen as early as this year. Alongside the funding, Nscale significantly bolstered its board with high-profile appointments including former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, former Yahoo president Susan Decker, and former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.

At the core of Nscale's strategy is its ambitious 'Stargate Norway' project, an AI supercluster aiming to deploy 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2026, with OpenAI signed as its first major customer. The company is pursuing vertical integration, controlling everything from energy sourcing and data center construction to compute orchestration software. This latest funding follows a $1.1 billion Series B in September and a recent $1.4 billion debt facility, highlighting intense investor appetite for large-scale AI compute infrastructure. Nscale also expanded its partnership with Microsoft to deploy approximately 200,000 GPUs across data centers in Europe and the US.