A crypto miner became Europe’s most valuable AI startup in two years. Now it is spending $812 million to prove the model scales.

Nscale, a crypto miner turned $14.6 billion neocloud, is investing €695 million in Portugal to supply 66,000 Nvidia Rubin GPUs to Microsoft’s Start Campus site in Sines. The deal extends Europe’s fastest AI infrastructure buildout, funded by private capital following GPU demand economics rather than by sovereign compute programmes.

Two years ago, Nscale was a cryptocurrency mining operation. On Tuesday, the company announced €695 million ($812 million) in new infrastructure investment in Portugal, an expansion of its partnership with Microsoft that will deliver more than 66,000 Nvidia Rubin GPUs to a site with 1.2 gigawatts of permitted capacity. Nscale is now valued at $14.6 billion after a $2 billion Series C in March, backed by Nvidia, Lenovo, Dell, Citadel, Jane Street, and Nokia. It operates data centres across the UK, Norway, Portugal, Iceland, and the United States, and its CEO has said the ...