Australian entrepreneur Josh Payne builds AI data centre company Nscale

Josh Payne, an Australian entrepreneur, founded Nscale, a company that builds and operates data centres used for computing.

He left school at 17 and worked in construction and other businesses before turning to data centres.

Nscale began inside his earlier company, which had focused on Bitcoin mining, and shifted its computing capacity to artificial intelligence.

The company now operates five data centres and has contracts for 12 more.

It has also secured major contracts with Microsoft and Anthropic, and backing from Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and former Meta executives Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg.

Nscale is among a growing group of cloud computing companies expanding quickly to meet demand from AI, though such businesses can carry heavy debt.

Payne is preparing the company for a possible stock market listing at a valuation of $35 billion, and has said he wants to build a company worth $1 trillion.