Nscale secures £581.1m to build 115MW Narvik data centre to host GPUs
This article covers Nscale, an AI infrastructure startup, securing £581.1m ($790m) in new financing in a growth funding round to underwrite a major expansion of its Narvik AI data centre campus in Norway. The financing is intended to fund a further build-out at Narvik, including an uncommitted accordion for an additional 115MW of capacity, to support large-scale GPU hosting and model training for AI workloads in Europe.
Nscale has secured £581.1m ($790m) in new financing in a growth funding round to underwrite a major expansion of its Narvik AI data centre campus in Norway — a move that underlines the capital intensity of building large-scale AI infrastructure across Europe.
Why it matters
The deal is notable for its size and structure: banks and export finance bodies have committed a sizeable facility that includes an uncommitted accordion feature to support a further 115MW expansion at Narvik, which Nscale calls the largest AI infrastructure investment in Norway. The financing arrives after an earlier £1.5bn ($2bn) Series C in March 2026 and a £1bn delayed draw term loan in February 2026, signalling continued appetite for funding physical AI capacity rather than purely software plays.
Large facilities such as Narvik matter because training and hosting next-generation models requires concentrated GPU fleets, power and cooling, and long-term capital — areas where public and institutional lenders often play a greater role than venture capital.
Inside the product
Nscale presents itself as a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company that owns and operates energy, data centres, GPU compute and software. Its product mix includes:
- AI services: inference endpoints, a prompt workbench and fine-tuning tools to run and adapt models.
- Platform services: managed Slurm for distributed model training, a Kubernetes service and virtual machine instances to run containerised workloads.
- Infrastructure services: on-demand GPU and CPU compute, networking and storage.
- Fleet operations: a control centre, observability tooling and the Radar API to monitor usage and events.
The Narvik campus is central to this stack: the new financing is earmarked for data centre capacity expansion (an additional 115MW under the accordion), which is the kind of heavy, location-specific investment required to host large GPU fleets at scale.
Who are the investors?
The committed financing is provided by ABN AMRO, DNB, Eksfin (Export Finance Norway), Nordea and SEB. ABN AMRO, DNB and Nordea acted as bookrunners, while Export Finance Norway and Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) were named as mandated lead arrangers. The package includes an uncommitted accordion facility intended to fund further build-out at Narvik.
The mix of commercial banks and export credit reflects the project-style nature of the transaction: lenders are underwriting a predictable, asset-backed expansion rather than providing pure equity. That structure complements Nscale’s earlier equity and debt rounds — notably the £1.5bn Series C in March 2026 led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries and a £1bn delayed draw term loan signed in February 2026 — giving the company a diversified financing base for large capital expenditures.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Josh Payne, Founder and CEO at 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.
Payne’s comment frames the deal as both a capacity play and a claim on market leadership in AI infrastructure. For customers — AI natives, enterprises and public sector organisations — the pitch is control and reliability by owning more of the stack from energy to software.
The bigger picture
Nscale’s latest financing highlights a maturing segment of the European AI ecosystem where hardware-heavy infrastructure projects attract debt and export finance alongside equity. Norway’s electricity mix and grid capacity make it an attractive location for energy-hungry facilities, and lenders appear willing to back that geography provided project economics are sound.
The transaction also reflects a broader trend: as models grow larger, capital needs shift from seed and venture rounds to structured, often multi-instrument financing that blends equity, term debt and specialised bank facilities. That evolution will shape which players can build and operate the scale of infrastructure required for advanced AI.
The deal is another signal that Europe’s AI infrastructure landscape is becoming a defined investment category — one that will influence how UK and European startups, cloud providers and research institutions access large-scale compute over the coming years.
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