Fresh off a $2 billion fundraising and $900 million line of credit, London-based data center startup Nscale is planning a big expansion at a new engineering office in Bellevue, Wash.
Nscale, one of the fastest-growing companies building AI computing infrastructure, recently inked a deal for nearly 24,000 square feet of space at The Eight office tower in downtown Bellevue.
The office is slated to open in January 2027. It will serve as Nscale’s primary engineering hub in the United States, a company spokesperson said. The company currently employs about 50 people in the Seattle area, and the new office will be able to accommodate up to 250 people.
The company earlier this year hired Nidhi Chappell, the former Microsoft corporate vice president who led Azure AI and high-performance computing infrastructure, including the supercomputers that power ChatGPT. As Nscale’s new president of AI infrastructure, based in the Seattle area, Chappell will oversee the company’s global engineering and data center operations.
“I’ve had a front-row seat to some of the biggest moments in AI over the past several years, but one thing has always stood out: the world remembers the breakthroughs, but it’s the people building the infrastructure behind the scenes who make them possible,” Chappell wrote in a LinkedIn post last week announcing the company’s first “onboarding” event in Seattle.
Nscale, which is also preparing to open an office in New York, said it selected Bellevue because of the Seattle region’s concentration of AI infrastructure talent and its proximity to major customers.
Microsoft is one example. Earlier this year, the companies announced an expanded collaboration to deploy Microsoft’s next-generation AI infrastructure across Europe, including large-scale installations of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs in Norway, Portugal and other locations. Nscale said it would be among the first providers outside of Microsoft to deploy the Vera Rubin platform, supporting Microsoft’s growing AI cloud infrastructure.
The new office is the latest sign of Bellevue’s growing role in the AI economy. The Eastside has become a magnet for companies building AI applications and infrastructure, with xAI, OpenAI, Databricks, CoreWeave, Armada, Anduril and others establishing and expanding offices.
AI companies have been giving a boost to the regional office market overall. Claude maker Anthropic, for example, recently announced an expansion of its offices in Dexter Yard in Seattle.
Nscale was founded in 2024. Its $2 billion funding round earlier this year valued the company at $14.6 billion, believed to be the largest Series C financing ever raised by a European technology company. The capital is being used to expand Nscale’s AI cloud platform, GPU infrastructure and data center footprint across North America and Europe.
Its backers include Astra Capital Management, Citadel, Dell, Jane Street, Lenovo, Linden Advisors, Nokia, NVIDIA and Point72.
News of the Nscale office in Bellevue was first reported by the Puget Sound Business Journal.
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