Nscale buys Anyscale as it seeks to own more of the AI compute stack

英国AI云服务巨头Nscale刚刚砸下16.5亿美元，收购了软件公司Anyscale，目标很明确：把AI算力的全链条都抓在自己手里。简单来说，Nscale本身像“超级计算机房东”，出租算力给企业训练AI；而Anyscale则提供一套管理软件，帮企业更高效地调度这些算力，让AI跑得更快、更省钱。两家公司本就是同一套技术团队出身，现在强强联手，从底层的能源、数据中心，到上层的编排调度软件，再到工作负载管理，全链条打通。这意味着客户以后不用再自己折腾怎么优化算力，Nscale能一站式搞定。对于普通人来说，这次收购最直接的影响可能是：未来用到的AI服务（比如聊天机器人、图片生成）会变得更便宜、更稳定，因为背后的算力调度效率大幅提升。同时，Anyscale的200名员工全部加入，将继续独立运营，现有客户不受影响。这波操作，反映出AI行业正从“拼参数”转向“拼基础设施效率”，而Nscale正试图成为这个新时代的头号玩家。

In a bid to capture more of its customers’ AI spending, British AI neocloud Nscale is buying software startup Anyscale, which helps companies scale their AI workloads across data centers and servers. Nscale is paying $1.65 billion for Anyscale, Bloomberg reported, citing an anonymous source. Founded by the same team that built the open source Project Ray distributed programming Python framework, Anyscale started by building a platform that allowed people to run projects that needed large amounts of computing power. But after the launch of GPT-3 in 2022 brought AI into the spotlight, the company pivoted to offer scaling services for serving and training large language models, data curation, inferencing, reinforcement learning, and other tasks. The company’s platform is built around Ray, offering developer tools, observability, and orchestration. A deal to buy Anyscale would fall neatly into Nscale’s focus on building vertically to serve compute needs. The neocloud has set up business lines across energy, data centers, orchestration software, and now, with Anyscale, it will also offer workload management and scaling. “Together, Anyscale and Nscale can co-design the software layer and infrastructure beneath it, something that neither company could do as effectively by optimizing its layer alone,” Anyscale said in a statement. Nscale this March raised $2 billion in a Series C round that saw it valued at $14.6 billion. Its investors include Nvidia, Nokia, Blue Owl, Dell, and Norwegian industrial giant Aker. The neocloud has been busy putting that money, as well as various debt raises, to work, securing compute and data center partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, British Telecom, and Nordcraft. Anyscale, which was valued at $1.38 billion in a 2022 Series C round, said its revenue increased by 70% in its most recent quarter, compared to the previous sequential quarter. Nscale said Anyscale will continue to operate under its own branding and serve its existing customers. The startup’s approximately 200 employees are all joining Nscale.