UK-based AI infrastructure firm Nscale will invest $865 million for a 10-year, 40 MW colocation agreement with WhiteFiber’s planned NC-1 data center complex in Madison, North Carolina. This builds on Nscale’s recent efforts to enhance AI infrastructure in Europe and the US.
Earlier this year, Nscale said it would increase its North American footprint and greenfield data center pipeline by “hundreds of megawatts of new capacity.”
WhiteFiber has invested $150 million in the one million-square-foot facility, situated on 96 acres in a rural area north of Charlotte. The Nscale deal positions NC-1 as an anchor AI computing site to support its growing US infrastructure footprint. In October, Nscale contracted with Microsoft to deliver 104,000 Nvidia GPUs in a 240 MW data center in Barstow, Texas.
Under the agreement with WhiteFiber, Nscale will begin paying for 20 MW of capacity in April 2026, and another 20 MW the following month. WhiteFiber also agreed to provide Nscale with priority notification of any additional capacity that becomes available.
“You’re going to see more and more of these megawatt deals,” Steven Dickens, CEO and analyst at HyperFrame research, told DCN. “In 2026, I’m expecting a lot of these types of announcements.
WhiteFiber, a subsidiary of Canadian firm Enovum Data Centers, stated that it was also in advanced discussions with several leading lenders to address immediate buildout requirements to accommodate the Nscale deal. That could include buildouts to increase capacity, the company said.
“WhiteFiber has taken a prudent and cautious approach to client selection,” Sam Tabar, CEO of WhiteFiber, said in a statement. “This agreement validates our strategy to engineer NC-1 to meet hyperscaler specifications and support the most advanced AI workloads.”
In September, Nscale raised $1.1 billion in Series B funding to support its expansion across Europe, North America, and the Middle East.
“We are building the AI-native infrastructure platform of tomorrow,” Nscale CEO Josh Payne said in a statement at the time. “AI is reshaping industries, economies and national strategies – but it cannot happen without the physical backbone: the data centers, the GPUs and the software to orchestrate them.”
