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.
