Nscale, a London company that builds and runs data centers for AI, signed a definitive agreement on July 30, 2026, to acquire Anyscale, the San Francisco startup founded by the team that created the open-source Ray framework. The companies did not disclose the price. Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the deal, reported that Nscale is paying about $1.65 billion.
The deal needs regulatory approvals and other closing conditions to be met, and Nscale expects it to close in the second half of 2026. Anyscale will keep its own brand and continue to serve its existing customers, who can still run its software on infrastructure of their choice and will later be able to run it on Nscale's platform.
All of Anyscale's roughly 200 employees, based in the US, Europe and India, will join Nscale. Goldman Sachs International and Morgan Stanley advised Nscale, with Latham & Watkins as legal counsel, while Qatalyst Partners and Fenwick & West advised Anyscale.
What Anyscale built
Anyscale was started in 2019 to commercialize Ray, an open-source framework that spreads Python and AI workloads across many machines. Ray handles tasks developers would otherwise write by hand, such as replacing a failed server in the middle of a training run or keeping a model and its data on the same machine to cut network traffic, SiliconANGLE reported. The project was donated to the PyTorch Foundation in 2025 and remains open source and community governed. Nscale said it would join the foundation.
Anyscale sells a managed, paid version of Ray with developer tools, monitoring and orchestration. TechCrunch reported that the company first focused on general large-scale computing and, after the launch of GPT-3 drew attention to AI, shifted to helping customers train and serve large language models, curate data, run inference and carry out reinforcement learning across thousands of GPUs.
Its customers include Coinbase, Bedrock Robotics and Runway. In a blog post, Anyscale's co-founders said revenue grew 70% in the most recent quarter compared with the quarter before, Reuters and TechCrunch reported.
“Most infrastructure providers just buy GPUs and rent them. Nscale is doing something unique. We build and own every layer ourselves: the power, the data centers, the compute, and the software that turns them into an AI cloud.”
Why Nscale is buying
Nscale was formed in early 2024 from a cryptocurrency mining business, Dealroom reported, and now runs what is often called a neocloud: a cloud provider that owns its data centers, GPUs and software and rents AI computing capacity. Its own sites are in Glomfjord and Narvik in Norway, Loughton in the UK and Texas, with partner-operated sites in Portugal, Iceland, Norway, the UK and North Carolina. Its largest project is a 2,250-acre campus in Mason County, West Virginia, with its own small power grid.
Founder and chief executive Josh Payne said that most infrastructure providers simply buy GPUs and rent them out, while Nscale builds and owns every layer, from power to software. He said Anyscale's managed services complete that stack, so customers can process data, train and fine-tune models, run inference and deploy agents in one place.
Anyscale chief executive Keerti Melkote said companies are now building their own AI rather than just using it, which requires software and infrastructure to be designed together. Nscale's chief product officer, Dan Bathurst, said other neoclouds are also trying to move up the stack into software, according to Dealroom.
The funding behind both companies
Anyscale was valued at $1.38 billion in a 2022 Series C round, TechCrunch reported, which puts the reported sale price only modestly above that mark four years later. Dealroom lists the company as having raised about $260 million in total.
Nscale raised $2 billion in a Series C in March 2026 that valued it at $14.6 billion. Its investors include Nvidia, Nokia, Blue Owl, Dell and Norwegian industrial group Aker, and it has signed compute and data center deals with Microsoft, British Telecom and Nordcraft. Dealroom reported that Nscale has said it plans to go public, possibly as soon as the second half of 2026.
Neoclouds move into software
Nscale competes with CoreWeave and Nebius Group, Reuters reported. In May 2026 Nebius agreed to spend $643 million on Eigen AI, Dealroom noted, as AI cloud providers look for software that sets them apart from rivals renting similar hardware.
Nscale already offers managed versions of Kubernetes and Slurm, two open-source tools for running server clusters, and plans to sell Anyscale's software alongside them.
