Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US) will team up with Nscale for the fourth time in two months to jointly build a 240 megawatt AI data center in Texas.

Data center developer Nscale, specializing in artificial intelligence, has agreed to build a data center for Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US) in Texas. This is the fourth similar agreement reached between the two companies in the past two months. According to a statement from Nscale on Wednesday, the new site will have a power capacity of up to 240 megawatts. The UK-based startup company stated that the facility, which is set to start operation in the third quarter of 2026, will deploy around 104,000 new NVIDIA Corporation GB300 chips. The statement did not disclose the specific location in Texas. Founded in 2024, Nscale was established after being spun off from a cryptocurrency mining enterprise. With the surge in demand for computational resources, it has become one of the most active new AI chip leasing companies. In recent months, as part of a large-scale deployment to support AI models and services globally, these companies have announced a series of new facility plans. This all comes at a time when the AI industry has yet to report profits and many such infrastructure developers lack experience. For example, Nscale has not yet built a data center. Nevertheless, Microsoft Corporation is still willing to be its partner. Last month, the software giant reached a five-year, $6.2 billion agreement with Nscale to build a data center in Norway. Nscale stated on Wednesday that the number of NVIDIA Corporation GB300 chips planned to be deployed in Norway is about half of the new site in Texas. On Tuesday, Microsoft Corporation and Nscale announced plans to build a new data center in Portugal, following a similar agreement reached for a future site in the UK. Microsoft Corporation has entered into several such deals with so-called "new cloud operators" to compensate for its lack of in-house server computing capacity. Nscale CEO Josh Payne stated that the startup is seeking to go public as early as next year. Compared to other recent projects, the planned facility in Texas is relatively small in scale. OpenAI plans to invest around $40 billion in its "Starlink" AI infrastructure development project to develop five sites with a total capacity of about 7 gigawatts. Microsoft Corporation is currently building a data center with a capacity of at least 900 megawatts in Wisconsin.