British AI neocloud Nscale is acquiring Anyscale, the software startup that helps companies scale AI workloads across data centers and servers, for $1.65 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing an anonymous source2,4.
The deal deepens Nscale's vertical integration strategy across the AI compute stack. Nscale has established business lines spanning energy, data centers, and orchestration software; with Anyscale, it will add workload management and scaling capabilities.
"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.
Anyscale was founded by the team that built Project Ray, an open-source distributed programming framework for Python. The company initially built a platform for running projects requiring large amounts of computing power, but pivoted after the launch of GPT-3 in 2022 brought AI into the spotlight. Its platform now offers scaling services for serving and training large language models, data curation, inferencing, reinforcement learning, and other tasks, built around Ray with developer tools, observability, and orchestration.
Nscale raised $2 billion in a Series C round in March that valued the company at $14.6 billion. Its investors include Nvidia, Nokia, Blue Owl, and Dell.
ANALYSIS The acquisition fits a pattern visible in Nscale's corporate structure: by controlling both the infrastructure layer and the software that orchestrates workloads on top of it, the company can offer customers a more tightly integrated product — and capture a larger share of each customer's AI spending.