Anyscale, the startup behind the widely used open-source Ray AI framework, is being acquired by London data center builder Nscale in a deal Bloomberg reports at $1.65B.
The London-based data center builder is assembling a vertically integrated AI cloud: it owns the power, the data centers, the compute and, now, the software that turns them into a service.
“We build and own every layer ourselves,” founder and CEO Josh Payne said. “Anyscale extends that offering with managed services that AI teams use to scale any workload.”
Anyscale’s founders created Ray in 2019, and the project has become a standard tool for running big AI workloads across many servers. It automatically swaps in replacement machines when hardware fails and keeps models close to their training data to hold down bandwidth costs.
The startup sells a paid cloud version with managed Ray clusters that launch in under a minute, plus dashboards for troubleshooting.
Nscale itself closed a $2B round in March, with Nvidia among the backers. Its flagship build is in Mason County, West Virginia: a 2,250-acre campus with its own micro power grid, sized by the company’s estimate for more than eight gigawatts of compute.
Nscale expects the deal to close before the new year. Customers will get Anyscale’s platform alongside Nscale’s managed versions of Kubernetes and Slurm.
