Nscale Closes $790M for Norway AI Data Center as Capital Stack Tops $4B
Nscale closed $790M in new project financing on May 11 for its AI data center campus in Narvik, Norway, bringing total committed capital raised in the past four months to well over $4B.
The Capital Stack
| Round | Amount | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Delayed Draw Term Loan | $1.4B | Feb 2026 |
| Series C (Aker ASA, 8090 Industries) | $2.0B | Mar 2026 |
| Bank Financing (Narvik) | $790M | May 2026 |
The May financing — committed by ABN AMRO, DNB Bank, Nordea, Export Finance Norway (Eksfin), and SEB — includes an additional $790M uncommitted accordion feature to fund a further 115 MW expansion at Narvik. Norway’s sovereign export credit agency (Eksfin) participation signals state-level backing for the project.
What Nscale Is Building
Narvik is Europe’s largest AI infrastructure investment by a single operator. The site draws on Norway’s abundant hydropower — a structural advantage over European locations with fossil-dependent grids — and is positioned as sovereignty-grade compute for AI-native companies, enterprises, and governments that need non-US data handling.
Nscale describes itself as vertically integrated: it owns and operates energy supply, data centres, GPU compute, and software in a single stack — a model that gives hyperscale clients efficiency and control not available from co-location providers.
The Microsoft Angle
Separately, Nscale announced it will deliver 66,000+ NVIDIA Rubin GPUs to Microsoft at the Start Campus site in Lisbon, Portugal, starting in late 2027. A second letter of intent covers 1.35 GW of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 compute at a West Virginia AI factory campus in partnership with Microsoft and NVIDIA, with Caterpillar providing power infrastructure.
The Rubin GPU commitments are notable: they require securing allocations from NVIDIA into 2027-2028, when Vera Rubin production is expected to ramp. Nscale’s scale — and the Microsoft anchor — gives it credible priority in that queue.
Positioning
Nscale is emerging as the European infrastructure counterpart to CoreWeave in the US. Both are GPU-native, vertically integrated, and anchored by hyperscale clients. CoreWeave’s Q1 backlog of $99.4B and $8.5B investment-grade loan closed in March set the benchmark. Nscale’s trajectory suggests a similar path, at a smaller but rapidly scaling order of magnitude.
The Norway location remains its clearest differentiator: data sovereignty, renewable power, and political stability in a jurisdiction outside US export control jurisdiction.