The UK government has set itself an ambitious target of becoming an artificial intelligence (AI) superpower, and this is a position it is seeking to secure by championing the developers of homegrown AI tools and technologies.
As the government pithily stated in its January 2025 AI opportunities action plan document: “We must be an AI maker, not just an AI taker: we need companies at the frontier that will be our UK national champions.”
One company the government certainly seems to be championing to fill that role is AI infrastructure provider Nscale, which has previously described itself as the UK’s “only full stack sovereign AI infrastructure provider”.
Since the start of 2025, the company has received passing mentions in various ministerial speeches, building up to its CEO, Josh Payne, being quoted in press releases issued by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) about the government’s ambitious AI agenda.
On 16 September 2025, the company was name-checked as “British firm Nscale” in two government press releases , one detailing its work with ChatGPT creator OpenAI to create sovereign AI compute capacity, and another about its involvement in Microsoft’s bid to create the UK’s largest AI supercomputer in Loughton, Essex.
For a company that was, according to Companies House, only incorporated in May 2024, the calibre of its technology collaborators and the high regard the government appears to hold it in is curious to say the least.
Especially the latter’s trumpeting of the company as a British tech success story, given , as confirmed by Companies House , the majority of its directors are based in the US, and the bulk of its built datacentre infrastructure is in Norway.
So, where did Nscale come from? And why is the government so sure its technology holds the key to it becoming an AI maker, rather than an AI taker?
What is the background to Nscale?
Nscale was incorporated in the UK on 29 May 2024, with Companies House confirming the company has seven directors, with four of them residing in the US, two in the UK and one in Australia.
Among the UK directors is the company’s chief executive Payne, who is also the only director listed as being a person of “significant control”.
Nscale is understood to have been spun out of a company founded by Payne and another individual , Nathan Townsend, also a director at Nscale , called Arkon Energy, which specialises in the provision of cryptocurrency mining and renewably powered datacentre infrastructure from sites in Ohio, the US and Norway.
In December 2023, Payne posted on LinkedIn that Arkon Energy had secured $110m in funding, which he declared to be the “largest private funding round for a bitcoin mining platform” that year.
The post stated that the funding will be used to triple the company’s US-based datacentre capacity to 300MW, and pave the way for it to launch its AI Cloud Service platform from its existing datacentre in Norway.
“It has been an amazing year for Arkon Energy, having started the year with an operating capacity of 30MW and now ending the year with a portfolio of 330MW in total that is funded, [and] expected to be fully operational by Q3 2024,” wrote Payne.
Several months later, in February 2024, there was an abortive attempt started to get Arkon Energy listed on the Euronext Amsterdam Stock Exchange via a reverse merger with a shell company known as BM3EAC.
However, nine months later, in November 2024, it was confirmed that both companies had terminated discussions on the matter, and , during the intervening period , Nscale was spun out of Arkon.
Townsend is still listed as working for Arkon Energy (and Nscale) on his LinkedIn profile, but the Arkon Energy website appears to have disappeared from the internet altogether.
What does Nscale actually do?
Nscale markets itself as an AI hyperscaler that provides the datacentres, software and applications that enterprises and governments need to deliver on their own AI ambitions.
The company has its flagship Glomfjord datacentre in Norway, which is reportedly powered by hydroelectricity, and claims to have a “global pipeline of greenfield datacentres” under development.
Does Nscale have any UK datacentres?
The company announced in January 2025 that it planned to invest $2.5bn in the UK datacentre industry over the next three years, having purchased its first UK site in Loughton.
Nscale said the site is equipped with 50MW of AI and high-performance compute capacity, which could be scaled up to 90MW, and should be live by late 2026. The company said it also plans to start building multiple modular datacentres in the UK, during the second half of 2025.
What about its partnerships and acquisitions?
Since its inception, the company has hit the acquisition trail to build out the capabilities of its AI infrastructure proposition, having snapped up Kontena, which specialises in the provision of high-density, modular generative AI datacentres, in July 2024.
It has also struck a few high-profile partnerships, including with OpenAI. It is collaborating with the company on its Stargate Norway initiative, which will see it help deliver 290MW of renewably powered compute capacity in the country, as announced in August 2025.
The company is also working with OpenAI and Nvidia in the UK on Stargate UK, as part of a government-backed push to build out the sovereign compute capacity for the sole purpose of hosting AI models.
As previously mentioned, the company is also involved in Microsoft’s bid to create the UK’s largest AI supercomputer in Loughton.
What has the UK government said about Nscale?
Quite a bit, as it goes. The company has been name-checked in ministerial speeches and DSIT press releases a fair amount since the government published its AI opportunities action plan document on 13 January 2025.
On that day, Nscale was described in a government press release as “one of the UK’s leading AI companies”, which is a bold claim for a company that , at that point , had only been in operation around eight months.
Exactly what information this descriptor was based on is unclear, given the company was , as confirmed by Companies House , still eight months shy of having to submit its first set of accounts at that point, which would give a clearer idea of its performance.
In another DSIT press release, released two days after the AI opportunities action plan report materialised in January 2025, Nscale is described by the government as “one of our leading home-grown success stories”.
Again, the “home-grown” descriptor is one that warrants closer examination, given that the majority of its directors are located overseas, the bulk of its infrastructure appears to be located in Norway, and the company it span out from was founded in Australia.
While Nscale was incorporated in the UK in May 2024, a profile on the company published around this time on overseas tech site IT Brief Australia also describes the company as being Norwegian.
The company does have a headquarters in the UK, and confirmed on 2 September 2025 that it is opening an office in Mayfair, London.
How is Nscale being funded?
In December 2024, Nscale announced it had raised $155m on the back of an “oversubscribed” series A funding round, which it claimed would allow it to accelerate the company’s expansion across Europe and North America.
Some 12 months before this, in December 2023, the company is understood to have also raised $30m in seed funding.
“Since launching from stealth in May 2024, Nscale has experienced insatiable demand for AI infrastructure, quickly growing its pipeline of greenfield datacentres across Europe and North America from 300MW to 1.3GW, with 120MW planned for 2025 development,” said the company, in the accompanying press release.
“The hyperscaler [Nscale] is now uniquely positioned to capitalise on the market for large-scale AI infrastructure, and can deliver bespoke GPU [graphics processing unit] clusters at any scale for governments, AI scaleups and global enterprises.”
On 25 September 2025, Nscale announced that it had secured $1.1bn in series B funding, with the round led by Norwegian industrial investment company Aker ASA, and supported by the firm’s existing shareholders, and tech firms Nokia and NVIDIA.
In a statement announcing the funding, the company said it plans to use the investment to accelerate the deployment of Nscale’s large-scale AI infrastructure across Europe, North America and the Middle East, and to grow the size of its engineering and operations teams.
