Quick Facts
- Nscale, valued at $14.6 billion, is acquiring Anyscale for a reported $1.65 billion in a deal expected to close in the second half of 2026.
- Anyscale’s roughly 200 employees will join Nscale, bringing with them the Ray open-source distributed computing framework used by OpenAI, Uber, and Spotify.
- Anyscale posted 70% sequential revenue growth in its most recent quarter ahead of the deal.
London-based Nscale announced July 30 it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Anyscale, the company behind the Ray distributed computing framework, for approximately $1.65 billion. Neither company confirmed the price in official statements; the figure comes from a person familiar with the deal who asked not to be identified.
The transaction is scheduled to close in the second half of 2026, pending regulatory approvals. Goldman Sachs International advised Nscale, and Morgan Stanley advised Anyscale.
Who Is Buying Whom
Nscale was founded by Josh Payne and spun out of Arkon Energy, a crypto-mining infrastructure company that pivoted to AI compute, similar to CoreWeave. The company owns its own power infrastructure, data centers, and GPU clusters across a half-dozen countries.
Its flagship project is a 2,250-acre campus in Mason County, West Virginia, designed to host more than eight gigawatts of computing capacity. In Norway, Nscale is building an AI infrastructure project targeting 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2026, with OpenAI as an initial customer.
In March 2026, Nscale closed a $2 billion Series C round led by Aker and 8090 Industries, with participation from Nvidia, Lenovo, and Nokia. That round placed the company’s valuation at $14.6 billion and was described as the largest in European history.
Anyscale was founded in 2019 by computer scientists from UC Berkeley’s RISELab. The company commercializes Ray, an open-source distributed computing framework that companies use to scale AI workloads across thousands of GPUs. Ray was donated to the PyTorch Foundation in 2025 and continues as a community-governed open-source project.
Anyscale’s managed platform gives developers access to Ray clusters launchable in under a minute, along with monitoring dashboards for troubleshooting. The company had raised approximately $259 million in total funding before this deal, including a 2022 Series C that valued it at $1.38 billion. Andreessen Horowitz participated in every funding round.
The Strategic Bet
The acquisition joins Nscale’s physical infrastructure assets with Anyscale’s software layer. Payne described the goal as owning every part of the stack, from the power source to the software running AI workloads.
“Most infrastructure providers just buy GPUs and rent them,” Payne said. “Anyscale extends that offering with managed services that AI teams use to scale any workload, completing a truly vertically integrated AI cloud platform.”
Anyscale CEO Keerti Melkote called the combined company “the first full-stack AI hyperscaler.” Melkote said companies are moving from consuming AI to building their own models, and that requires software and infrastructure designed together.
Nscale plans to offer Anyscale’s software to its existing customer base. Anyscale’s approximately 200 employees across the United States, Europe, and India will join Nscale as part of the deal.
IPO Signals
The acquisition carries clear market positioning logic. Payne told The New York Times that Nscale might seek to go public as early as 2026. Adding Anyscale’s software business, which posted 70% sequential revenue growth in its most recent quarter, gives Nscale a stronger story for public-market investors than GPU rental alone.
For enterprise buyers, the deal signals that AI infrastructure competition is moving up the stack. Providers that can offer compute plus orchestration software in a single platform are positioning against both hyperscalers and pure-play GPU clouds. Anyscale’s foothold with AI teams at major companies gives Nscale a software distribution channel it previously lacked.
Read more: Nscale buys AI infrastructure optimization startup Anyscale for reported $1.65B
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