Nscale acquires Anyscale for $1.65bn to control full AI compute stack
The British neocloud's purchase of the Ray-based software startup signals a push by European-backed players to own every layer of AI infrastructure.
London-based AI cloud provider Nscale is acquiring Anyscale for $1.65 billion, adding workload orchestration software to its growing portfolio of data centres, energy assets and compute partnerships.
The deal marks the latest step in Nscale's strategy of vertical integration. The company wants to capture a larger share of corporate AI spending by controlling everything from power supply to the software that distributes training jobs across thousands of GPUs.
Anyscale was founded by the creators of Ray, an open-source Python framework for distributed computing. After the 2022 release of GPT-3 shifted the industry's focus toward large language models, the startup retooled its platform to handle model training, inference, reinforcement learning and data curation at scale.
Revenue at Anyscale grew 70 per cent in its most recent quarter compared with the previous one, suggesting demand for its orchestration tools is accelerating alongside the broader AI buildout.
For Nscale, the acquisition fills a gap at the top of its stack. The neocloud already operates across energy, data centre infrastructure and lower-level orchestration. Anyscale's developer tools and observability layer will let it offer customers a more complete package without relying on third-party software.
"Together, Anyscale and Nscale can co-design the software layer and infrastructure beneath it, something that neither company could do as effectively by optimising its layer alone," Anyscale said.
Nscale has the capital to spend. A $2 billion Series C round in March valued the company at $14.6 billion, with backing from Nvidia, Nokia, Dell, Blue Owl and Norway's Aker. It has since deployed that cash alongside debt financing to lock in partnerships with Microsoft, British Telecom and Nordcraft.
Anyscale's roughly 200 employees will all transfer to Nscale, though the startup will retain its brand and continue serving existing clients independently.
The acquisition price represents a modest premium over Anyscale's $1.38 billion valuation in its 2022 funding round. That relatively contained markup reflects both the startup's revenue growth and the strategic value of owning the software layer in a market where hardware alone is no longer a sufficient differentiator.
I prefer this response
Response 2
Acquiring Anyscale marks a pivotal step in expanding European AI infrastructure capabilities
Skip
I prefer this response
