Nscale buys Anyscale as it seeks to own more of the AI compute stack

In a bid to capture more of its customers’ AI spending, British AI neocloud Nscale is buying software startup Anyscale, which helps companies scale their AI workloads across data centers and servers.

Nscale is paying $1.65 billion for Anyscale, Bloomberg reported, citing an anonymous source.

Founded by the same team that built the open source Project Ray distributed programming Python framework, Anyscale started by building a platform that allowed people to run projects that needed large amounts of computing power.

But after the launch of GPT-3 in 2022 brought AI into the spotlight, the company pivoted to offer scaling services for serving and training large language models, data curation, inferencing, reinforcement learning, and other tasks. The company’s platform is built around Ray, offering developer tools, observability, and orchestration.

A deal to buy Anyscale would fall neatly into Nscale’s focus on building vertically to serve compute needs. The neocloud has set up business lines across energy, data centers, orchestration software, and now, with Anyscale, it will also offer workload management and scaling.

“Together, Anyscale and Nscale can co-design the software layer and infrastructure beneath it, something that neither company could do as effectively by optimizing its layer alone,” Anyscale said in a statement.

Nscale this March raised $2 billion in a Series C round that saw it valued at $14.6 billion. Its investors include Nvidia, Nokia, Blue Owl, Dell, and Norwegian industrial giant Aker. The neocloud has been busy putting that money, as well as various debt raises, to work, securing compute and data center partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, British Telecom, and Nordcraft.

Anyscale, which was valued at $1.38 billion in a 2022 Series C round, said its revenue increased by 70% in its most recent quarter, compared to the previous sequential quarter.

Nscale said Anyscale will continue to operate under its own branding and serve its existing customers. The startup’s approximately 200 employees are all joining Nscale.