Nscale, the London AI-cloud company that owns its own power and data centres, is buying its way up the stack. It has agreed to acquire Anyscale, the startup behind the widely used Ray software. Bloomberg reported the deal at about $1.65bn.
Nscale announced the acquisition on Thursday but did not put a price on it. Bloomberg gave the figure, citing a person familiar with the deal. Anyscale’s 200 or so staff, spread across the US, Europe and India, will join Nscale. The deal should close in the second half of 2026.
Why a power company buys software
Nscale’s pitch has always been that it owns the layers beneath the chip: the electricity, the buildings, the racks. Buying Anyscale moves it up into the software that decides how much useful work each expensive GPU actually does.
The logic is about margins. Renting raw GPUs by the hour is a commodity business, fought against every rival buying the same Nvidia systems. The money sits a layer up, in how a job gets split across thousands of chips at once.
Anyscale’s platform, built on the open-source Ray framework, does exactly that. It spreads data preparation, training, fine-tuning and inference across a whole fleet. The company claims that cuts total cost of ownership by up to 90% against a patchwork of separate tools.
“Most infrastructure providers just buy GPUs and rent them,” said Josh Payne, Nscale’s chief executive and founder. He said Nscale instead builds and owns every layer itself: the power, the data centres, the compute and the software.
Its product chief, Dan Bathurst, put the pitch plainly. An engineer can now come to Nscale, he said, as “a one-stop shop for all of their training, fine-tuning and inference services.”
The neocloud land grab
Nscale is one of the “neoclouds,” the wave of AI-focused data-centre newcomers chasing the boom. It grew out of a cryptocurrency-mining business in early 2024. It has moved fast since, passing 1GW of capacity and signing big compute deals.
It has also lined up the money to keep building. In July it closed a $900m revolving credit facility, on top of a $2.5bn commitment to UK data centres. It plans to float, possibly later this year. Its board includes the former Meta executives Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg.
Its rivals are making the same move. In May, Nebius spent $643m to buy Eigen AI, another firm that makes AI run more cheaply. The chipmaker Qualcomm bought the compiler startup Modular this month. “Everyone’s wanting to move up the stack,” Bathurst told Bloomberg. The prize is to be the one-stop shop as the money floods into AI infrastructure.
What Nscale is actually buying
The open-source project at the centre of the deal is not for sale. The PyTorch Foundation took over Ray in 2025, and it had already logged some 237 million downloads. It stays community-governed and free to run anywhere, from Cursor to xAI.
Nscale is buying the commercial platform, the engineering team and the customers, which include Coinbase, Runway and Bedrock Robotics. It will join the foundation too.
Anyscale arrives with momentum, reporting 70% revenue growth in its most recent quarter. Its chief executive, Keerti Melkote, called the combined company “the first full-stack AI hyperscaler.” That is the bet: own everything from the electricity to the trained model. It is the same logic behind the race to build national AI factories.
Whether it pays off is a question of timing. Anyscale sells against capacity that runs today. Nscale’s largest deployment, a 1.35GW site for Microsoft in West Virginia, only starts arriving in 2027.
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