British artificial intelligence infrastructure firm Nscale is raising heaps of cash as it looks to ramp up the deployment of AI data centers across Europe.

Nscale, which is based in London, said Thursday that it has raised $1.1 billion in a bumper Series B funding round. The investment was led by Aker, the Norwegian industrial investment company, with additional participation from a raft of firms including Nvidia, Nokia and Dell.

The investment highlights continued demand for high-powered computing infrastructure, which is required to train and run powerful foundational AI models from companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.

Nscale has become a central player in Britain’s ambition to become a global AI powerhouse. Last week, the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI announced multibillion-dollar projects involving Nscale to build out AI computing infrastructure across the U.K.

“We are creating one of the largest global [infrastructure] platforms of its kind – purpose-built to meet surging demand and unlock breakthroughs at unprecedented scale,” said Josh Payne, Nscale’s CEO and co-founder, in a statement.

“This allows Nscale to provide our customers access to scarce, and highly sought after, compute capacity and rapidly accelerate the build-out of secure, compliant and energy-efficient AI infrastructure,” he added.

Nscale was spun out from Arkon Energy, an Australian cryptocurrency mining firm, in 2023 to address soaring demand for data centers capable of handling AI workloads.

It is working with OpenAI in the U.K. and Norway to build new data centers as part of the ChatGPT maker’s Stargate investment project. Nscale said that part of the Series B funding would go toward “enabling the rapid rollout” of the Stargate data center projects in Europe.

The company is committing $1 billion for the Norwegian project, with the goal of racking up 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) at the site before 2027. The U.K. site, meanwhile, will house 8,000 GPUs in its first phase early next year, with the option to expand capacity to around 31,000 GPUs over time.

WATCH: How Britain’s startup sector is evolving

Danish startup Light is the latest in a series of European tech firms raising cash as venture capitalists search for the next big thing in artificial intelligence.

Founded in 2022, Light develops software that uses AI to automate various functions that exist within businesses’ finance teams, including accounting, bookkeeping and financial reporting.

The Copenhagen-headquartered company told CNBC that it had raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital, an early investor in fintech unicorns Revolut and GoCardless.

Atomico, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp and Entrée Capital also invested in the round, along with angel investors including Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and Meta board member Charlie Songhurst.

Light plans to use the cash to “double down on the commercial side” of the business, Jonathan Sanders, Light’s CEO and co-founder, told CNBC. The startup recently opened an office in London and says it is planning to open one in New York to meet U.S. demand.

Light isn’t the only startup out there using AI to streamline companies’ finance and accounting processes.

Pigment, a business planning and forecasting platform designed to be more user-friendly than Microsoft Excel, last year raised $145 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. More recently, accounting software startup Pennylane raised 75 million euros ($88.4 million), doubling its valuation to 2 billion euros.

Currently, the market for software that helps companies manage their finances is dominated by industry behemoths like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. However, these systems can often be cumbersome, requiring specialists to “tinker around the edges for a year or two just to make it work,” according to Sanders.

“We service fast-growing, fast-scaling companies who need a system where they can expand really fast,” Sanders told CNBC. Light’s customers include Lovable, the buzzy Swedish AI firm recently valued at $2 billion, and Sana Labs, which is being acquired by Workday for $1.1 billion.

Sanders said AI can rapidly transform how companies handle their finances. “The future of numbers is text,” he says. For example, rather than sifting through company policies to find a team’s meal allowance, this can be automated by an AI agent that has access to the relevant documents.

Moving forward, Light wants to focus on large, enterprise-level customers that struggle with “broken processes and workflows,” according to Sanders. “No human team can continuously analyze, reconcile and update thousands of pages of policies for coherence,” he told CNBC.

WATCH: Is Europe’s IPO market finally staging a comeback?

Nvidia’s massive investment in OpenAI, announced earlier this week, will put billions of dollars into the coffers of the artificial intelligence startup to use as it sees fit. But most of the money will go towards use of Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips.

The agreement between the two companies was big on numbers but thin on specifics. They said the investment would reach up to $100 billion, paid out as AI supercomputing facilities open in the coming years, with the first one coming online in the second half of 2026.

The timing of the buildouts and the cost of each data center remains up in the air. However, what’s become clear is that OpenAI plans to pay for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) through lease arrangements, rather than upfront purchases, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not be named because the details are private.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who described this week’s deal as “monumental in size,” has estimated that an AI data center with a gigawatt of capacity costs roughly $50 billion, with $35 billion of that used to pay for Nvidia’s GPUs. By leasing the processors, OpenAI can spread its costs out over the useful life of the GPUs, which could be up to five years a person said, leaving Nvidia to bear more of the risk.

The Information previously reported on some aspects of the lease arrangement.

Nvidia agreed to invest over time as OpenAI’s data centers get up and running. The initial $10 billion will be available to OpenAI soon, and help the company work towards deploying its first gigawatt of capacity, a source told CNBC.

While Nvidia’s equity investment could help OpenAI with hiring, marketing and operations, the biggest single item it will be used for is compute, the people said. And that’s almost entirely directed at Nvidia’s GPUs, which are key to building and training large language models and for running AI workloads.

As a non-investment-grade startup that lacks positive cash flow, financing remains costly. OpenAI executives have called equity the most expensive way to fund data centers, and said that the company is preparing to take on debt to cover the remainder of the expansion. 

In addition to offering a cost-efficient way for OpenAI to access chips, Nvidia’s lease option and long-term commitment can help the company land better terms from banks when it comes to raising debt, a person said.

An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment.

Speaking to CNBC in Abilene, Texas, home to the first new data center, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar pointed to the role Oracle and Nvidia are playing in the financing. Oracle, one of OpenAI’s partners on the Stargate project, is leasing the Abilene facility, and OpenAI will eventually pay for the operations.

“Folks like Oracle are putting their balance sheets to work to create these incredible data centers you see behind us,” Friar said. “In Nvidia’s case, they’re putting together some equity to get it jumpstarted, but importantly, they will get paid for all those chips as those chips get deployed.”

She said all the big partners are needed to help relieve a dramatic shortage of capacity.

“What I think we should all be focused on today is the fact that there’s not enough compute,” Friar said. “As the business grows, we will be more than capable of paying for what is in our future — more compute, more revenue.”

Still, the OpenAI-Nvidia deal has raised some concerns about the sustainability of the AI boom.

Nvidia’s march to a $4.3 trillion market cap has been driven by GPU sales to OpenAI as well as to tech megacaps like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. OpenAI’s path to a $500 billion private market valuation has been enabled by hefty investments from Microsoft and others that allow the company to burn billions of dollars in cash while building its AI models that power services including ChatGPT.

Jamie Zakalik, an analyst at Neuberger Berman, said the Nvidia deal is the latest example of OpenAI raising money that it pours right back into the company providing the capital.

Investors are concerned about the “circular nature of this deal goosing up everyone’s earnings and everyone’s numbers,” said Zakalik. “But it’s not actually creating anything.”

Asked about those fears, Altman told CNBC the company is focused on driving real demand.

“We need to keep selling services to consumers and businesses — and building these great new products that people pay us a lot of money for,” he said. “As long as that keeps happening, that pays for a lot of these data centers, a lot of chips.”

— CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report

WATCH: Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank unveil Stargate data center expansion