The New Gold Standard: How NVIDIA Turned GPUs Into Currency

Let me drop a name: Nscale. Have you heard of it? Most likely not. Yet this September, the company raised $1.1 billion – the largest Series B in European history – followed by another $433 million through a pre-Series C SAFE, reaching a $3 billion valuation in less than two years. How did they do it, I wondered. What’s their story?

Nscale sits at the junction of capital, energy, and geopolitics. Its rise is compelling on its own – but far more revealing as part of a larger pattern.

Welcome back to our AI Infrastructure Unicorns series. This one is unusual. Through Nscale, we’ll explore how the AI industry is maturing and how NVIDIA has learned to mint unicorns at will – financing its own customers, seeding sovereign compute hubs, and turning supply chains into strategy. A system where data centers become national assets and GPUs behave like currency.

It’s the story of an AI boom transforming into an industrial system.

In today’s episode:

• Nscale: Following the Blueprint

• How Does It Work - the Alliance Web

• Follow the Pattern

• The Bretton Woods of Compute

• The Economic Loop that Feeds the Engine

• Sovereign Compute: Where AI Becomes Industrial Policy

• “NVIDIA is Everywhere.” Has Anyone Done This Before?

• Risks

• If this is a bubble, it is a least a functional one

• Concluding Thoughts: Is it a Perfect Machine?

• Resources

Nscale: Following the Blueprint

With the Unicorn series, we’ve traveled to China and explored Silicon Valley. This episode takes us to Norway, where hydroelectric power hums through the racks of a company that barely existed two years ago and is now valued at crazy $3 billion. And if you think it’s a Norwegian company – you’re wrong. Nscale – this wunderkind startup – is a national pride of the UK. It used to be a crypto miner; now it’s all-in on AI. Let’s untangle.

In many ways, Nscale follows the path that CoreWeave pioneered. CoreWeave, a New Jersey-based company that started as an Ethereum mining collective in 2017, became the first great pivot story of the AI infrastructure age (we’ve covered them here). When in 2022 Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake, CoreWeave repurposed its GPU mining rigs to power machine learning workloads, grew into a hyperscale cloud provider, and by March 2025 went public at a valuation around $18 billion (as of market close on November 7, 2025, its market capitalization stands at about $68.32 billion.) It was the first proof that crypto’s stranded compute could be alchemized into the fuel of the AI boom.

Nscale shares that lineage. The company was spun out of Arkon Energy, an Australian Bitcoin mining operation with a simple strategy: chase cheap, renewable power wherever it exists. Founded by Josh Payne, Arkon had acquired and built facilities in Glomfjord, Norway (hydroelectric surplus), Ohio, USA (stranded energy), while keeping corporate headquarters in Sydney. The geographic sprawl wasn't elegant, but it was profitable – at least while crypto was.

When the crypto market collapsed in 2023, most miners liquidated their GPU inventories and shut down. Payne saw something different: the perfect infrastructure for AI was already built. The same requirements that made a good crypto mine – cheap electrons, cold climates for cooling, fiber connectivity – were exactly what AI compute clusters needed. The hardware was there. The power contracts were signed. The only thing that needed to change was the workload.

At the end of 2023, Arkon raised $110 million and executed the pivot with surgical precision. First, in May 2024, Payne incorporates a new entity, Nscale, in London to tap European AI funding and government support. Then in July, Nscale acquires Kontena, a Finnish firm that built modular data-center pods – prefabricated "AI rooms" that could be shipped and assembled within weeks.

From there, they moved fast. Nscale first hydropower-fed campus in Glomfjord, Norway, became the prototype for low-carbon AI infrastructure. Soon after, a 50/50 joint venture with Aker ASA and OpenAI – Stargate Norway – was launched to deploy 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by 2026.

By September 2025, Nscale turned to the UK, announcing a partnership with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI as part of the UK-US Technology Partnership. The plan: to deliver up to 58,640 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs nationwide, within a global build-out of 300,000 units.

At its center stands the Loughton AI Campus, a 50 MW facility (scalable to 90 MW) set to become the UK’s largest AI supercomputer in 2027, powered by 23,040 GB300 GPUs for Microsoft Azure. In parallel, Stargate UK will bring OpenAI’s compute to sovereign UK sites, starting with Cobalt Park and an initial 8,000 GPU offtake in 2026.

A month later, Nscale and Microsoft expanded their deal to 200,000 GB300 GPUs across Europe and the U.S., including hyperscale sites in Texas and Portugal – turning Nscale’s footprint into a distributed, energy-aware GPU network spanning continents.

The speed created an identity crisis that was almost comic. Here was a company with Australian roots, Norwegian power, and British incorporation being hailed as the UK’s “national champion” for AI – even though its largest site sat hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle. But the confusion masked something more important: in less than five months, Nscale had turned crypto’s stranded assets into critical AI infrastructure. At least in press-releases.

That story alone would make Nscale an interesting pivot case. But its real significance appears when you zoom out. What connects companies like Nscale and CoreWeave isn’t geography or governance – it’s GPUs, and the gravitational pull of NVIDIA. Let’s see how these unicorns fit inside NVIDIA’s monetary machine →