Nscale buys Anyscale for 1.65 billion dollars, expands its AI infrastructure layer

Nscale, a British AI neocloud company, announced the acquisition of the startup Anyscale. According to a Bloomberg report citing an anonymous source, it will pay 1.65 billion dollars for the company. Anyscale emerged from the team that created the open-source Ray framework for distributed programming in Python and initially offered a platform for projects requiring substantial computing power. Following the surge in interest in AI after the release of the GPT-3 model in 2022, the company shifted to scaling services for training and deploying large language models, data preparation, inference and reinforcement learning.

The acquisition fits into the strategy of Nscale to build a vertically integrated offering of computing power for AI. The company already operates in energy, data centers and orchestration software, and the acquisition of Anyscale adds workload management and scaling. According to a joint statement from Anyscale and Nscale, the combination will allow them to design both the software layer and the underlying infrastructure together in a way that neither company could achieve by optimizing only its own layer.

Nscale raised 2 billion dollars in a Series C round in March this year at a valuation of 14.6 billion dollars, with investors including Nvidia, Nokia, Blue Owl, Dell and Aker. The company has partnerships for computing power and data centers with Microsoft, British Telecom and Nordcraft. Anyscale was valued at 1.38 billion dollars in a Series C round in 2022, and according to the company, its revenue grew by 70 % in the latest quarter compared with the previous quarter.

According to Nscale, Anyscale will continue to operate under its own brand and serve existing customers. All approximately 200 employees of the startup will move to Nscale.