UK company Enscale, key to the government’s AI ambitions, has raised $2 billion (£1.5 billion) in a funding round and appointed former Meta executives Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg to its board of directors.
It brings the valuation of the London-based startup, which is backed by US tech company Nvidia, to $14.6 billion, and follows a $1.1 billion funding round for the company, it said in a statement. raised last September.
Clegg, a former UK deputy prime minister, “brings deep expertise at the intersection of technology, policy and global affairs”, and he is “at the center of the most consequential regulatory and governance conversations shaping the future of AI”, the company said.
Sandberg, the former COO of Meta, has “unrivalled experience growing the world’s most impactful technology companies.”
Enscale ready to contribute to a massive infrastructure, Stargate UK partnership It was announced last year that it would involve a partnership between OpenAI and Nvidia.
this is also set Construction A supercomputer at Loughton is part of a government campaign to “mainline AI” into the UK economy. According to the government and Enscale, this supercomputer is scheduled to come online later this year.
“UK-based Enscale’s success shows how companies are seizing the opportunity to invest, expand and create jobs in this country,” Liz Kendall, the technology secretary, said in a statement.
“We have Europe’s leading AI ecosystem, and this news further underlines the growing international confidence in the UK as the natural home of AI innovation.”
Enscale was spun off from Australian Bitcoin mining company Arkon Energy in 2024. Its website promotes datacenters across the US and Europe, including the UK, Portugal, Norway and Iceland.
However, most of these do not appear to be datacenters built by Enscale itself; Its flagship project in Norway, Glomfjord, was originally advanced By Norwegian company Hydrocraft.
Enscale’s UK investment is part of a global blitz of AI deal-making announced last year, as governments and mostly US tech companies committed huge sums of money to build massive datacenter infrastructure and fundamentally reshape the global economy.
The UK government last September Said That US tech companies will contribute £31 billion to building the UK’s AI infrastructure. In the US, OpenAI Said It will commit $500bn to build AI infrastructure as a part of the Stargate project, with participation from Oracle and SoftBank.
Nvidia announced a series of AI deals, including sovereign agreements as well as a £500 million investment in Enscale and a $100 billion investment in OpenAI, which was mostly to go toward purchasing its own chips.
Cracks are beginning to appear in some promises. Nvidia’s $100 billion deal with OpenAI fell apart in early February. Oracle and OpenAI said last week that they are ending plan of Expanding a datacenter in Abilene, Texas, which is a key part of OpenAI’s Stargate US project.
