The agreements, under the aegis of a “tech prosperity deal” between Britain and America on Trump’s state visit, were worth £31 billion in total. And they all had one thing in common: Josh Payne, a little-known 31-year-old Australian who, somehow, found his way to the top table of tech and political power players.
Payne is the co-founder and chief executive of Nscale, a 21-month-old data centre start-up that was named by each of the tech behemoths as their key local partner.
Silicon Valley’s finest pledged an epic infrastructure buildout on these shores. It is up to Nscale to deliver it, putting shovels in the ground to erect and then run the vast, power-hungry facilities that will house the most advanced chips in the world, including the supercomputer in Loughton, Essex, and OpenAI’s Stargate UK, starting with a site in Cobalt Park in Newcastle.
Payne, who was not made available for comment, said in a press release: “As a UK-based company, we’re showing how we can be makers, not takers, of the most important technology of our time.”
Which raises the obvious question: who is Payne, and can he pull this off?
The company declined to respond to questions, referring instead to press releases and public domain information. Yet a deeper look at Payne and Nscale raises questions about the company that has emerged as the surprising linchpin of the transatlantic tech alliance and Silicon Valley’s partner of choice for the Great British build-out.
For one, Nscale, despite billing itself as “Europe’s hyperscaler engineered for AI”, has yet to build and complete a data centre. It has begun expansion of an already operating facility it bought in Glomfjord, a town of 1,000 people just inside the Arctic Circle in Norway. But it has yet to build one itself, let alone deliver or operate one of the scale of the proposed Loughton supercomputer, or the $6.2 billion Norway data centre it announced with partners Microsoft and Aker, the industrial investment giant.
What Payne has done is lure industry veterans to his start-up and strike deals with top industry partners. Aker said: “Nscale may be young, but it’s moving fast. They’re scaling a team with a solid track record and already building momentum with major customers, including Microsoft and OpenAI.
“This is exactly the kind of complementary partnership Aker has thrived on before: pairing entrepreneurial speed with our industrial know‑how.”
Nscale will also need money, billions of dollars, even after Nvidia’s Jensen Huang announced last week a £500 million investment in the business. Nscale was reported in April to have hired Goldman Sachs to raise $2.7 billion but the company has made no announcements about new funding.
Amid this AI boom, signing deals and figuring out the finances later has become strangely common. OpenAI reportedly inked a multi-year, $300 billion cloud service contract with Oracle, news of which sent the latter’s stock to its highest in its 48-year history, even though OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year and will have to raise vast new sums to make good on the contract.
Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor at New York University, dubbed the market’s reaction to the deal, “bat-shit insane”, arguing that it was indicative of a market that had entered full bubble mode. He added: “We are well past peak bubble, in fact, and into peak musical chairs. It’s not going to be pretty when the music stops.”
The type of investment that Nvidia made last week in Nscale — where a big company puts money into a customer that will then immediately turn around and spend much of that money on the first company’s goods — has also become de rigueur. Before Huang’s investment, Nscale had raised $185 million. Between Stargate UK, its Norway plans and the Loughton supercomputer, Nscale and its partners will need to spend billions of pounds on the Nvidia chips that will be housed in those sites. Through that lens, Nvidia’s investment looks more like it is funding its own customer. Huang said: “We convinced ourselves that Nscale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the UK.”
Perhaps most extraordinary of all is the rise of Payne himself. There is little in the public domain about him before 2021, when he was part of a group that raised $300 million for a New York-listed cash shell. The goal of this special purpose acquisition vehicle, or Spac, was to acquire a battery company and then combine it with their new publicly listed entity. In the pandemic, Spacs boomed because they offered an easier route to the public markets for companies that would otherwise not survive the rigour of a traditional stock market float. Most Spacs turned out to be disasters for investors.
In the listing document for the company, called Battery Future Acquisition Corp, a brief biography on Payne said that in 2017 he co-founded an Australian staffing agency for the “civil, tunnelling and mining industries”. Two years later, he set up PT Capital, a corporate advisory firm in Sydney focused on companies in renewable energy and technology.
His fourth company, counting the Spac, came in 2022, in the form of Arkon Energy. The company published a press release in February that year, announcing its “record-breaking” A$2.6 million (£1.27 million) initial funding round. Arkon billed itself as a “bitcoin data centre infrastructure and mining business”.
Bitcoin mining involves vast amounts of computing power, which is required to solve the cryptographic puzzles that generate new bitcoin. This appears to have been Payne’s first foray into data centres. In November 2022, Arkon raised $28 million from private investors to buy Hydrokraft, owner of a 30MW data centre in Glomfjord, powered by a nearby hydroelectric facility. The following June, it did a similar deal for a data centre in Hannibal, Ohio. Payne said at the time: “Hannibal, Ohio will only be the first of several acquisitions as Arkon Energy is building out its US footprint.”
Arkon’s American adventure, however, was short-lived. The AI boom had set off a once-in-a-generation infrastructure building frenzy. The likes of Alphabet, Amazon and Meta ramped up immense data centre construction programmes, dishing out billions to get their hands on Nvidia’s all-important AI chips. Nvidia surged to become the most valuable company on Earth. Industry analysts estimated that companies would spend $3 trillion on AI infrastructure by 2030.
In the shadow of that boom, bitcoin mining suddenly looked passé. Six months after laying out his grand plans in America, in December 2023, Payne quietly raised $30 million for his new company, Nscale. As it rose, Payne cut ties with his other ventures. In January 2024, he and his fellow executives resigned from Battery Future Acquisition, having failed to find a suitable takeover target. Battery Future, under new management, merged with an education technology company that, as of Friday, was valued at $34 million. Ten months ago, Arkon sold its two Ohio data centres — it had acquired a second, smaller facility — to a rival. The company’s website is nonfunctional and up for sale.
When Nscale emerged from “stealth” mode last May, the same month that it was incorporated in London, its assets comprised Arkon’s former Glomfjord data centre and some very big plans, touting “over 500MW of greenfield site expansion”. The Loughton site was acquired in January with outline planning permission to build a data centre. Nscale plans to complete it by the end of next year; it could not confirm to The Sunday Times whether it already has a grid connection to the site.
Payne has become a dealmaking machine. He has raised hundreds of millions of pounds from many of the same investors who have been with him since Arkon. He struck alliances with the top tech companies on the planet, and won the confidence of Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, and even Sir Keir Starmer.
At an Nvidia event in London on Thursday, Huang told the crowd: “When I met Josh three months ago he was worth £0 billion.” Laughs rippled through the room. “Today after I’ve invested, he’s worth …. £0 billion,” he quipped. “In the future, we’ll see.”
