When Nvidia moves, the global AI ecosystem shifts. The world’s most valuable chipmaker has made yet another aggressive push into AI infrastructure, this time with a £500 million ($683 million) equity investment in London-based startup Nscale.

The deal is part of a broader £11 billion ($15 billion) commitment with Nscale and U.S. rival CoreWeave to expand the U.K.’s AI capacity — and it underscores how Nvidia is rapidly extending its influence well beyond silicon.

Nvidia’s strategy has been clear for months: invest directly in companies building the backbone of AI. The chipmaker recently took a 4% stake in Intel, and it has poured billions into CoreWeave, one of its biggest infrastructure customers. With Nscale, Nvidia is now anchoring itself to Europe’s rising push for “sovereign AI,” a bid to keep critical workloads and data on local soil.

Nscale’s Meteoric Rise

Just two years ago, Nscale didn’t exist as a standalone entity. It was spun out of Arkon Energy, a crypto-mining infrastructure provider, to meet surging demand for AI-specific data centers after OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked the AI boom in late 2022.

Like CoreWeave in the U.S., Nscale repurposed its crypto roots into an AI infrastructure business, combining vast data center capacity, high-density power, and thousands of GPUs with software layers for clients.

The transformation has been astonishingly fast. In May 2023, Nscale came out of stealth, quickly partnering with the UAE’s Open Innovation AI to deploy 30,000 GPUs. It acquired Finnish high-performance computing firm Kontena, then struck a deal with Asian telecom giant Singtel to offer GPU-as-a-Service in Europe and Southeast Asia. Initially reliant on AMD hardware, Nscale pivoted to Nvidia GPUs as its partnerships deepened.

By December, it closed one of the largest Series A rounds in U.K. history — $155 million led by Sandton Capital Partners. With that, the company expanded its pipeline from 300 megawatts to 1.3 gigawatts in just one year and set a target of running 350,000 GPUs by 2027.

Microsoft and OpenAI, Too

Tuesday’s announcements signaled Nscale’s leap into the big leagues. The company was named an AI infrastructure partner for Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI. It also revealed a five-year, $6.2 billion deal with Microsoft and Norwegian industrial group Aker to develop “hyperscale AI infrastructure” across Europe, with Norway as the anchor.

Microsoft committed $15.5 billion of new investment in the U.K., headlining plans to build the country’s largest supercomputer in Loughton, Essex. That site will house 23,040 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs by early 2027, providing 50 megawatts of AI power, scalable to 90 megawatts.

“No one can make that kind of capital investment unless they’ve got somebody already committed to spend the money once the work is complete, and that’s the role we’re playing,” Microsoft President Brad Smith explained.

Meanwhile, OpenAI confirmed it would launch Stargate U.K. in partnership with Nscale and Nvidia, initially deploying 8,000 GPUs next year, with the capacity to expand to 31,000. The sites will span several regions, beginning with Newcastle’s Cobalt Park.

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang personally announced the £500 million equity injection, telling reporters: “We convinced ourselves that Nscale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the U.K.”

Europe’s Sovereign AI Gamble

Nscale’s emergence coincides with Europe’s drive for “sovereign AI” — a policy push requiring data centers and AI workloads to remain within European jurisdictions. Britain’s AI action plan, rolled out in January, promised to slash bureaucratic barriers to domestic AI growth.

Josh Payne, Nscale’s founder and CEO, framed the Microsoft and Aker partnership as a “huge win for European-owned AI infrastructure.” In earlier remarks, he said Europe’s biggest challenges were a lack of computing capacity and a “very fragmented market.” His vision is to create massive projects that smaller players can consume from, unlocking productivity and economic growth.

Nick Patience, AI practice lead at Futurum Group, said the announcements signal government recognition that “it has to do something to get the AI infrastructure built here, which has been a long slog.”

Scaling Targets, Heavy Costs

Payne has set ambitious targets: 50,000 GPUs by the end of 2025 and 150,000 by the end of 2026. Long term, Nscale aims to reach 350,000 GPUs by 2027. Its Norwegian project with OpenAI alone has a $1 billion commitment, with plans to host 100,000 GPUs before 2027.

But scaling at this pace is intensely capital-intensive. Building AI data centers requires billions in both debt and equity. CoreWeave has already raised $12.4 billion in debt and over $1 billion in equity, plus a $1.5 billion bond issue in July after a $2 billion debt sale in May.

Nscale is following a similar path, reported earlier this year to be raising $1.8 billion in private credit through Goldman Sachs.

Outlook

Analysts sketch three possible paths for the partnerships. In the optimistic case, Nscale leverages its Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI alliances to secure long-term contracts and dominate Europe’s AI infrastructure landscape, emerging as a “CoreWeave of Europe.” In the base case, it achieves steady growth but faces periodic financing strains, forcing slower buildouts. The downside scenario sees mounting debt, regulatory bottlenecks, or execution delays stalling projects, leaving Nscale vulnerable to acquisition.

At its “Make with Notion” event on Thursday, productivity platform Notion introduced its first AI agent, a significant step that transforms the service from a flexible collaboration tool into a more autonomous productivity assistant.

The new agent will draw on all of a user’s Notion pages and databases as context, automatically generating meeting notes, competitor evaluation reports, and feedback landing pages. It can also create entirely new pages and databases or update existing ones with fresh data, properties, or views.

One of the key features is cross-platform connectivity. Users can trigger Notion’s agent from other linked services such as Slack, email, or Google Drive. In one demo, the agent was asked to assemble a bug-tracking dashboard by pulling information from multiple external sources — a task that would otherwise require manual setup.

The company positioned the agent as a major leap from its earlier Notion AI tool, which focused on summarization and search. The new agent leverages agentic AI, meaning it can handle complex, multi-step workflows. According to Notion, it can sustain a process running up to 20 minutes across hundreds of pages without user intervention.

To keep outputs aligned with user preferences, Notion has introduced customizable “profile” pages. These allow users to instruct the agent on referencing sources, formatting style, and task updates. The agent can also “remember” recurring points and store them in the profile page for ongoing use, giving teams greater control over long-term workflows.

During its demonstration, Notion showed examples of the agent updating landing pages with feedback, preparing competition analysis reports, creating restaurant trackers, and synthesizing meeting notes. For now, users must trigger such actions manually. But the company said it is working on customizable agents that operate on schedules or triggers, which will enable more hands-free automation. A template library of prebuilt agents is also in development, designed to help teams quickly adopt the new system.

The launch comes after two years of steady expansion. Notion has rolled out a calendar app, Gmail client, meeting note-taker, and enterprise search that integrates information from external platforms. Those features now serve as the contextual backbone for its new automation push.

Notion is also entering a crowded field. Competitors like Salesforce, Fireflies, and Read AI have already launched their own AI-driven agents, each designed to extract, analyze, and update enterprise knowledge bases. With the new agent, Notion is betting that its flexible, all-in-one workspace will give it an edge over rivals by combining automation with deeply personalized context.

Some say the move marks a pivotal moment for the platform, as it marks the logical evolution of Notion’s vision — from being a customizable productivity canvas to becoming an autonomous system that works on your behalf.

Outlook

The introduction of Notion’s agent is likely to deepen the competitive reshaping of the enterprise productivity market, where AI agents are fast becoming the centerpiece. Analysts outline three possible outcomes:

1. Fast Adoption, Competitive Differentiation. If Notion’s agent proves reliable, users who already depend on the platform’s flexible interface may quickly adopt it as a trusted productivity partner. This could position Notion as a credible alternative to Microsoft’s Copilot ecosystem, especially among startups and mid-sized companies that value customization over standardization.

2. Integration Pressure. Larger enterprises, however, often prioritize seamless integration across software ecosystems. Here, Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot and Microsoft 365’s AI assistants may have the upper hand, given their deep links to enterprise infrastructure. For Notion to succeed, it will need to scale integrations beyond Slack and Google Drive to enterprise-grade platforms like SAP, Oracle, and ServiceNow.

3. Automation Fatigue and Caution. A more cautious scenario involves pushback from users hesitant to give agents too much control over workflows, citing accuracy concerns, over-automation, or compliance risks. If errors creep into automated competitor reports or meeting summaries, organizations may hold back adoption until governance tools and quality guarantees mature.

However, what is clear is that AI agents are no longer experimental add-ons — they are becoming central to how productivity software competes. The move by Notion represents both a growth opportunity and a challenge: to prove that a lightweight, flexible platform can stand up to tech giants that are embedding AI into every layer of enterprise software.

A 25 basis point (0.25%) interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve generally signals a shift toward a more accommodative monetary policy, aimed at stimulating economic activity by making borrowing cheaper and increasing liquidity.

Lower interest rates reduce the appeal of traditional safe assets like bonds, which offer lower yields, pushing investors toward riskier assets like cryptocurrencies. This can lead to increased capital inflows into Bitcoin, Ethereum, and altcoins as investors seek higher returns.

Markets often price in expected rate cuts, so a 25-basis-point cut may not trigger an immediate price spike if already anticipated (e.g., a 95.4% likelihood was noted for a December 2024 cut). Instead, short-term volatility could occur as traders react to the Fed’s broader economic projections or comments from Chair Jerome Powell.

Bitcoin is often viewed as a hedge against fiat currency depreciation, especially in a low-rate environment where increased liquidity could weaken the U.S. dollar. A 25-basis-point cut may enhance Bitcoin’s appeal as a store of value, particularly with its fixed supply of 21 million coins.

However, if the cut signals deeper economic concerns (e.g., recession fears), Bitcoin could face near-term selling pressure alongside other risk assets. Altcoins and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols may see amplified effects due to their higher risk profiles. Lower rates could spur investment in DeFi projects, as cheaper borrowing encourages speculative ventures.

However, volatility risks remain high, and rapid price swings could follow. Stablecoins, pegged to the dollar, may see increased usage in a low-rate environment, as their issuers earn less on reserves, but demand could grow for trading volatile tokens.

The crypto market’s response may be tempered by external factors, such as incoming U.S. policies under President Donald Trump (e.g., tariffs, tax cuts), which could drive inflation and limit further rate cuts in 2025. This uncertainty may dampen bullish sentiment.

Regulatory developments, like enhanced SEC oversight or pro-crypto legislation (e.g., the CLARITY Act), could also influence market dynamics, potentially overshadowing the rate cut’s impact. The Fed’s forward guidance, including projections for 2025 rate cuts (currently estimated at two more), will heavily influence crypto markets. Unexpected hawkish signals could trigger sell-offs.

Job reports, inflation data (e.g., CPI at 2.7% in November 2024), and GDP growth will shape the Fed’s future moves, indirectly affecting crypto sentiment. Posts on X suggest optimism for Q4 2025, with expectations of new all-time highs for crypto if liquidity increases. However, these are speculative and not definitive.

A modest 25-basis-point cut may have a muted impact compared to larger cuts (e.g., 50 basis points in September 2024), as markets often anticipate smaller moves. Crypto’s high volatility means price movements may not solely reflect Fed policy. Factors like institutional adoption (e.g., Bitcoin ETFs) or regulatory shifts can dominate.

Economic uncertainties, such as Trump’s policies or global growth concerns, could counteract liquidity-driven gains. A 25-basis-point rate cut is likely to support crypto prices by increasing liquidity and risk appetite, potentially driving short-term gains in Bitcoin and altcoins.

However, the effect may be limited if already priced in, with volatility possible based on Fed guidance and broader economic signals. Investors should monitor FOMC projections, regulatory developments, and macro trends while avoiding emotional trading driven by market hype.