Sheryl Sandberg has a habit of joining tech firms before they become household names. She joined Google at roughly 250 employees and Facebook at 550. When Josh Payne set out to recruit her to the board of his AI infrastructure startup Nscale, it was a letter to his management team that convinced her she’d found another one.
“The only person I’d ever seen write like that was Mark [Zuckerberg],” Sandberg tells Fortune. “It was so clear, so thorough, but so big in its vision.”
Payne wants Nscale to become the “foundation layer” beneath the global AI market. He got Sandberg on board, along with former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and former Yahoo president Susan Decker. “I wanted a board that had experience building a trillion-dollar company,” says Payne, “because I believe that we can do the same.”
Josh Payne, Nscale’s chief executive, at the company’s offices in London.Charlotte Hadden—The New York Times/Redux
This board was another step in Nscale’s breakneck climb to the top of the UK’s AI scene. In just two years, the company has gone from a crypto-mining spinout to one of the most prominent companies in Europe’s AI data center push.
