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Nscale explained: Everything you need to know | Computer Weekly

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5 months ago

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Nscale explained: Everything you need to know | Computer Weekly


The UK government has set itself an ambitious target of becoming an artificial intelligence (AI) superpower, and this is a position it is seeking to secure by championing the developers of homegrown AI tools and technologies.

As the government pithily stated in its January 2025 AI opportunities action plan document: “We must be an AI maker, not just an AI taker: we need companies at the frontier that will be our UK national champions.”

One company the government certainly seems to be championing to fill that role is AI infrastructure provider Nscale, which has previously described itself as the UK’s “only full stack sovereign AI infrastructure provider”.

Since the start of 2025, the company has received passing mentions in various ministerial speeches, building up to its CEO, Josh Payne, being quoted in press releases issued by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) about the government’s ambitious AI agenda.

On 16 September 2025, the company was name-checked as “British firm Nscale” in two government press releases – one detailing its work with ChatGPT creator OpenAI to create sovereign AI compute capacity, and another about its involvement in Microsoft’s bid to create the UK’s largest AI supercomputer in Loughton, Essex.

For a company that was, according to Companies House, only incorporated in May 2024, the calibre of its technology collaborators and the high regard the government appears to hold it in is curious to say the least.

Especially the latter’s trumpeting of the company as a British tech success story, given – as confirmed by Companies House – the majority of its directors are based in the US, and the bulk of its built datacentre infrastructure is in Norway. 

So, where did Nscale come from? And why is the government so sure its technology holds the key to it becoming an AI maker, rather than an AI taker?

What is the background to Nscale?

Nscale was incorporated in the UK on 29 May 2024, with Companies House confirming the company has seven directors, with four of them residing in the US, two in the UK and one in Australia.

Among the UK directors is the company’s chief executive Payne, who is also the only director listed as being a person of “significant control”.

Nscale is understood to have been spun out of a company founded by Payne and another individual – Nathan Townsend, also a director at Nscale – called Arkon Energy, which specialises in the provision of cryptocurrency mining and renewably powered datacentre infrastructure from sites in Ohio, the US and Norway.

In December 2023, Payne posted on LinkedIn that Arkon Energy had secured $110m in funding, which he declared to be the “largest private funding round for a bitcoin mining platform” that year.

The post stated that the funding will be used to triple the company’s US-based datacentre capacity to 300MW, and pave the way for it to launch its AI Cloud Service platform from its existing datacentre in Norway.

“It has been an amazing year for Arkon Energy, having started the year with an operating capacity of 30MW and now ending the year with a portfolio of 330MW in total that is funded, [and] expected to be fully operational by Q3 2024,” wrote Payne.

Several months later, in February 2024, there was an abortive attempt started to get Arkon Energy listed on the Euronext Amsterdam Stock Exchange via a reverse merger with a shell company known as BM3EAC.

However, nine months later, in November 2024, it was confirmed that both companies had terminated discussions on the matter, and – during the intervening period – Nscale was spun out of Arkon.

Townsend is still listed as working for Arkon Energy (and Nscale) on his LinkedIn profile, but the Arkon Energy website appears to have disappeared from the internet altogether.

What does Nscale actually do?

Nscale markets itself as an AI hyperscaler that provides the datacentres, software and applications that enterprises and governments need to deliver on their own AI ambitions.

The company has its flagship Glomfjord datacentre in Norway, which is reportedly powered by hydroelectricity, and claims to have a “global pipeline of greenfield datacentres” under development.

Does Nscale have any UK datacentres?

The company announced in January 2025 that it planned to invest $2.5bn in the UK datacentre industry over the next three years, having purchased its first UK site in Loughton.

Nscale said the site is equipped with 50MW of AI and high-performance compute capacity, which could be scaled up to 90MW, and should be live by late 2026. The company said it also plans to start building multiple modular datacentres in the UK, during the second half of 2025.

What about its partnerships and acquisitions?

Since its inception, the company has hit the acquisition trail to build out the capabilities of its AI infrastructure proposition, having snapped up Kontena, which specialises in the provision of high-density, modular generative AI datacentres, in July 2024.  

It has also struck a few high-profile partnerships, including with OpenAI. It is collaborating with the company on its Stargate Norway initiative, which will see it help deliver 290MW of renewably powered compute capacity in the country, as announced in August 2025.

The company is also working with OpenAI and Nvidia in the UK on Stargate UK, as part of a government-backed push to build out the sovereign compute capacity for the sole purpose of hosting AI models.

As previously mentioned, the company is also involved in Microsoft’s bid to create the UK’s largest AI supercomputer in Loughton.

What has the UK government said about Nscale?

Quite a bit, as it goes. The company has been name-checked in ministerial speeches and DSIT press releases a fair amount since the government published its AI opportunities action plan document on 13 January 2025.  

On that day, Nscale was described in a government press release as “one of the UK’s leading AI companies”, which is a bold claim for a company that – at that point – had only been in operation around eight months.

Exactly what information this descriptor was based on is unclear, given the company was – as confirmed by Companies House – still eight months shy of having to submit its first set of accounts at that point, which would give a clearer idea of its performance.

In another DSIT press release, released two days after the AI opportunities action plan report materialised in January 2025, Nscale is described by the government as “one of our leading home-grown success stories”.

Again, the “home-grown” descriptor is one that warrants closer examination, given that the majority of its directors are located overseas, the bulk of its infrastructure appears to be located in Norway, and the company it span out from was founded in Australia.

While Nscale was incorporated in the UK in May 2024, a profile on the company published around this time on overseas tech site IT Brief Australia also describes the company as being Norwegian.

The company does have a headquarters in the UK, and confirmed on 2 September 2025 that it is opening an office in Mayfair, London.

How is Nscale being funded?

In December 2024, Nscale announced it had raised $155m on the back of an “oversubscribed” series A funding round, which it claimed would allow it to accelerate the company’s expansion across Europe and North America.

Some 12 months before this, in December 2023, the company is understood to have also raised $30m in seed funding.

“Since launching from stealth in May 2024, Nscale has experienced insatiable demand for AI infrastructure, quickly growing its pipeline of greenfield datacentres across Europe and North America from 300MW to 1.3GW, with 120MW planned for 2025 development,” said the company, in the accompanying press release.

“The hyperscaler [Nscale] is now uniquely positioned to capitalise on the market for large-scale AI infrastructure, and can deliver bespoke GPU [graphics processing unit] clusters at any scale for governments, AI scaleups and global enterprises.”



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These Are the Best Alternatives to Google’s Android Operating System

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10 hours ago

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February 14, 2026

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These Are the Best Alternatives to Google’s Android Operating System


Want Google out of your life? It’s pretty easy to find alternative search, email, and photo storage providers, but it’s much harder to come up with a mobile operating system that’s free of Google. The obvious answer is an iPhone, but if you want Google out of your life, you probably don’t want to immediately replace it with Apple. While a little better from a privacy standpoint, Apple is still not great.

Fear not, privacy-conscious WIRED reader, there are alternatives to Android. Technically speaking, most alternative mobile operating systems are based on Android, not alternatives to it, but these various projects all remove Google and Google-related services (to varying degrees) from the system. Typically that means all the Google services are stripped out and replaced with some alternative code (usually the micro g project), which is then sandboxed in some way to isolate it and restrict what it has access to. The result is a phone that is less dependent on Google, pries less into your privacy, and sometimes might offer a more secure experience. However, at their core, these are all still based on Android.

If you want a true alternative to Android, there are a few. I am sorry to say, free software fans, the best and most functional alternative to Android is still iOS. Most people looking for Android alternatives are not, however, looking to switch to an Apple device. There are a couple of Linux-based phone systems out there, most notably SailfishOS, which can run Android apps (I will be testing this next), but in my testing, none of the Linux-based operating systems are ready to be your everyday device.

Jump To:

Why De-Google Your Phone?

First off, you don’t have to remove Google. There are plenty of people happily running Google Services on LineageOS just because they want to tinker with the system and expand the capabilities of their phones. That’s a fine reason to dive into the world of Android alternatives.

Still, you don’t have to have a nice tinfoil hat to know that Google’s privacy record is laughable. De-Googling your phone is a way of enjoying the convenience of having a smartphone without sharing everything you do with Google and every app that takes advantage of its APIs. Should you be able to participate in the technological world without trading your privacy to do so? I think so, and that’s why I’ve used an Android alternative, GrapheneOS, for more than five years.

What Is the Android Open Source Project?

Google’s Android mobile operating system is open source, which means anyone can, in theory, build their own mobile operating system based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The AOSP just provides a base, though. There is much more to a mobile operating system than just the underlying code.

Android’s operating system may be open source, but it runs device-specific drivers and Google’s various Play Services application programming interfaces (APIs) with a suite of built-in apps for basic functionality. All of this stuff is another layer atop the Android operating system, and it’s this layer that’s very difficult for other projects to reproduce. It’s not hard for projects to get the AOSP code running, but it’s difficult to create a great mobile user experience on top, which is why the list of good de-Googled Android alternatives is short.

What Is the Bootloader and Why Is It Locked?

The bootloader is a piece of code that allows you to change which software boots up on your phone. The manufacturer of your phone puts a cryptographic key on the phone, the public read-only key. When an update is released, the manufacturer signs the update, and when the phone gets the update, it checks to make sure the signature matches the key. If it does, it applies the update, and if it doesn’t match it doesn’t. This is basic security and protects your device, but it also prevents you from loading another operating system, so one of the first things you’ll do when installing one of these de-Googled operating systems is unlock the bootloader.

Then you install the OS you want to install and then … you probably don’t relock the bootloader because most of the time that won’t work. This is why Pixel phones are popular with people who like to tinker and customize, because you can relock the bootloader on Pixels (and a handful of others), but by and large most people using alternative OSes just live with an unlocked bootloader. It’s not ideal, it’s a security vulnerability, but there’s also not a good solution aside from saying, get a Pixel.

Apple’s iOS does offer more privacy features than stock Android. In my experience, it’s a fine operating system, but it is still very tightly coupled to Apple. Sure, you can avoid iCloud, run your own syncing software, and not use Apple’s various tools, but to do that you’ll be fighting the phone every step of the way. If iOS works for you, that’s great, but for a lot of us, a de-Googled Android phone is just easier to use and more convenient.

Best Preinstalled Phone: Fairphone 6 With /e/OS

  • Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

  • Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Fairphone

Fairphone (6th Gen, /e/OS)

The best de-Googled phone experience for most people is going to be Murena’s /e/OS version of the Fairphone 6. Not only does it offer the full /e/OS experience out of the box, with a strong focus on privacy and blocking apps from tracking you, but the Fairphone hardware is repairable, the battery replaceable, and the bootloader is locked. The catch, if you’re in the United States, is that the Fairphone 6 only works with T-Mobile and its MVNOs. Somewhat ironically, it worked great on GoogleFi when editor Julian Chokkattu tested it last year. I tested it using T-Mobile’s prepaid plan, as well as RedPocket’s T-Mobile-based service, and had no issues with either.

The Fairphone 6 gets even better when you put /e/OS on it. Thanks to the privacy-first design of /e/OS, apps no longer track you, but they do still work 99 percent of the time, which is often not the case with some apps on alternate OSes (looking at you, banking apps).

The core of the privacy features in /e/OS revolve around the Advanced Privacy app and widget. Here you can block (or chose to allow) in-app trackers, and there are other features such as hiding your IP address or geolocation when you feel like it. The IP and geo-spoofing are nice for limited-use cases, but the main privacy feature for most of us is the ability to block trackers in apps—and it turns out there are a lot of those.

Murena also ships /e/OS with a very nice custom app store, the App Lounge. It’s similar to the Play Store, but with extras like privacy information about each app. Under each listing in the App Lounge you’ll see a grade from 1 to 10, where 1 is horrible for privacy and 10 generally means no trackers. The App Lounge also grades apps according to which permissions they require. The fewer permissions (like access to your photos or geodata), the higher the rating.



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The Internet’s Favorite Blanket Is 45 Percent Off

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11 hours ago

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February 14, 2026

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The Internet’s Favorite Blanket Is 45 Percent Off


If you’ve spent more than five minutes on TikTok, you’ve probably heard someone rave about Lola Blankets. They’re draped over couches in Get Ready With Me videos, folded at the foot of perfectly made beds, and name-dropped in podcast ads.

I wanted to be skeptical, but the hype is sadly real; we tested the blankets at WIRED and have included them in multiple gift guides and roundups, from the Best Weighted Blankets to the Best Housewarming Gifts to the Best Gifts for Mom.

From February 14 through February 16, Lola Blankets are 45 percent off with code WINTER45. No exclusions. This is the kind of discount that makes the math very compelling. Buy two, one for yourself and one as a present for a loved one, or a furry loved one (see below).

  • Courtesy of Lola Blankets

Lola Blankets

The Original Lola

Lola Blankets come in two styles: the Original and the Weighted Blankets. WIRED reviewer Nena Farrell adores the Original (in Malibu Blue). It comes in an assortment of colors, patterns, and collaborations, plus five sizes: baby, medium, large, Lola XL, and travel. The double-sided fabric is an Oeko-Tex Standard 100-certified faux fur blend of 95 percent polyester and 5 percent spandex, with four-way stretch. It’s zero-shed, stain-resistant, and double-hemmed for durability. I can confirm that durability matters. Mine has survived everyday use and the affections of my cat, who has fully claimed it as her throne BTW.

Image may contain: Home Decor, Rug, and Blackboard

Courtesy of Lola Blankets

Lola Blankets

Weighted Lola



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Top Sony Coupons: 45% Off Sony Headphones, WF-1000XM6 Earbuds, and Sony Cameras

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16 hours ago

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February 14, 2026

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Top Sony Coupons: 45% Off Sony Headphones, WF-1000XM6 Earbuds, and Sony Cameras


Sony makes some of the best electronics we’ve tested across a dizzying array of categories, from TVs and audio gear to cameras and gaming consoles. Sony products constantly occupy top slots on our Best TVs and Best OLED TVs lists, Best Wireless Headphones, and Best Cameras guides. If you’re shopping for products from any of those categories, you can pay a little less with our Sony promo codes for deals like 45% off Bravia Televisions, 30% off Sony headphones and earbuds, 15% off cameras and lenses, and more.

Sony Promo: 45% off Bravia Televisions

Sony Bravia models rank among the best TVs we’ve reviewed, from premium models like the revolutionary Bravia 9 QLED and brilliant Bravia 8 II OLED, to the more mid-tier Bravia 5, all of which are available on hot Sony deals right now, with this new promo for up to 45% off.

Use Sony Coupons and Save 30% off Sony Headphones and Earbuds

Sony has been synonymous with portable audio since the Walkman, and wireless headphones like the WH-1000XM series offer great performance and durability. We’re constantly putting them atop our list of the best wireless headphones thanks to excellent sound, feature-rich design, and noise-cancelling that ranks among the best in the business. With Sony online coupons, you can get great deals on Sony’s latest WH-1000XM6 headphones, which we loved for their upgraded sound and class-leading noise canceling, as well as the still-great previous generation, the WH-1000XM5.

Looking for earbuds? Sony’s nimble, noise-killing WF-1000XM5 are also on sale, as are plenty of other options from the brand’s diverse lineup. Click the link to get 30% off Sony headphones and earbuds goodness with this Sony promo code and Sony coupons.

Sony Discount: 15% off Sony Cameras and Lenses

Sony makes some of the best consumer cameras on the market. In fact, we recently named the Sony A7V the best mirrorless camera you can buy, and the previous A7 IV was similarly fabulous. Both are on great sales through these new offers, letting you grab serious image quality with 15% off our favorite Sony cameras and lenses.

Get 10% off or $25 off Sony TVs on Your First Purchase When You Sign Up for Emails

Looking for even more of the best TVs from Sony? Sign up for email alerts, and you could save 10% on a Sony TV or $25 off other Sony products.

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Love a great Sony deal? Join the My Sony Membership Program and you could earn Sony’s My Points rewards toward more good stuff by joining, making eligible purchases, or through other Sony promotional opportunities (full terms available here). It’s a free way to earn credits or receive other special benefits or offers. Join the My Sony Membership Program and start earning points today.



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