Josh Payne dropped out of school, spent three years underground in Australia, and taught himself business from books. Today, he's building one of Europe's most valuable AI infrastructure companies.
There is a version of this story that starts with a $2 billion funding round, a $14.6 billion valuation, and a board that includes Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, and Susan Decker.
That version is accurate, but it is also completely missing the point.
If you're interested in the company itself, we've already explored why Nscale may be one of the most important AI infrastructure businesses in Britain today.
The real version starts underground, literally.
Before Nscale started moving towards AI infrastructure, before all the board appointments, before NVIDIA, before London, and before AI became the most important conversation in technology.
There was a young bloke working twelve-hour shifts in an Australian coal mine, reading business books whenever he got the chance, because he knew one thing for certain:
He wasn't staying there forever.
Today, he's the founder and CEO of Nscale, one of Europe's fastest-growing AI infrastructure companies and a key player in UK's ambition to become a serious force in artificial intelligence.
But that's not what makes the story interesting.
The actual interesting part is how he got there.
Before Nscale
The thing we keep coming back to is a really simple image, which is of a young man sitting underground with a book.
According to The New York Times, Payne spent years working in Australia's mining industry after dropping out of school. During breaks, he read everything he could get his hands on, about business, entrepreneurship, and investing.
He didn't have a university degree.
He didn't have a network.
He didn't have a roadmap.
So, he built one himself.
Alongside mining, he started selling products online and experimenting with small businesses. Eventually, he launched a recruitment platform connecting construction workers with jobs across Australia.
It wasn't glamorous at all.
It was practical.
And that's a theme that appears throughout Payne's career.
Rather than chasing trends, he seems to have focused on understanding how industries actually work.
Construction led him into energy.
Energy led him into understanding AI data centres.
Data centres led him into the infrastructure potential of crypto mining.
And crypto mining led him to the idea that would eventually become Nscale: building world-class AI infrastructure at scale.
You see, Payne's career is not luck or timing, though both played a role. It is the habit of noticing where energy and infrastructure intersect and then following that intersection wherever it leads.
The coal mines taught him what physical infrastructure actually feels like from the inside.
The construction industry taught him how large infrastructure development projects are financed and built.
The crypto mining taught him that the real business was never the currency - it was always, the compute, the GPU clusters, the raw infrastructure potential.
"Although he didn't go to university, he certainly runs rings around myself and a lot of others on our financial team when it comes to how to structure the business." — Dan Bathurst, Chief Product Officer, Nscale
One Message Changed Everything
At some point, Payne sent a cold message on LinkedIn to Øyvind Eriksen, the chief executive of Aker, one of Norway's most powerful industrial conglomerates.
The pitch was straightforward: Norway had abundant hydropower, natural cooling, and access to energy, and Payne believed it was the ideal location for large-scale AI infrastructure and data centre development.
The message worked.
That conversation turned into a partnership.
That partnership eventually helped create the Narvik campus, now one of the largest AI infrastructure developments in Europe and home to some of the most sophisticated GPU clusters on the continent.
We want to pause on that for a moment.
In a startup world obsessed with warm introductions and exclusive networks, one of Europe's biggest AI infrastructure projects can trace its origins back to just a cold message on LinkedIn.
Sometimes that kind of simple approach does work.
The Pivot Nobody Saw Coming
By 2022, Payne's company was operating as part of Arkon Energy, a crypto mining business, but then the market turned and Bitcoin fell. Crypto economics deteriorated and many operators either doubled down or scaled back.
Payne did something different.
He looked at the AI infrastructure he had built, all the AI data centres, the power contracts, the GPU clusters, the relationships with energy companies in Europe and North America and asked a different question.
"What if the infrastructure mattered more than the cryptocurrency?"
The answer, as the generative AI boom was just beginning to make itself felt, was obvious in retrospect but not at all obvious in the moment.
AI training requires massive, dense GPU clusters; those clusters require dedicated power infrastructure and purpose-built AI data centres, and most AI companies are renting space in facilities that were not designed for this kind of workload, paying prices that were rising 13% year on year, and unable to build the contiguous 10,000-GPU clusters that serious AI work actually demands.
Payne already had the AI infrastructure foundation in place.
So in 2024, Nscale was spun out as its own company, leaving behind crypto mining and pivoting entirely toward AI infrastructure solutions.
The company positioned itself as a specialist provider of purpose-built AI infrastructure, serving some of the world's largest AI companies.
What looked like a pivot from the outside was really a reallocation of resources toward the sector's greatest infrastructure potential.
The foundations were already there.
The market had simply changed.
"We are experiencing insatiable demand." — Josh Payne, CEO and Founder, Nscale
From Coal Mines to NVIDIA
Not many founders get handed a bottle of whisky by Jensen Huang.
Josh Payne did.
When Nscale signed a landmark deal to supply GPU clusters and AI infrastructure to NVIDIA, Huang gave Payne a bottle of Johnnie Walker whisky.
"He was surprised to learn I came from the coal mines," Payne said.
We have thought about that line since we first read it, as it captures how unusual this journey has been.
The founder who taught himself business through books and trial-and-error is now building the AI infrastructure that some of the world's largest AI companies depend on.
The gap between those two realities is enormous.
Yet somehow, it feels entirely logical, as every step along the way built towards the next one.
What It Means For UK
The government that has been loudest about making the UK an AI superpower, has an Nscale AI infrastructure site as one of its most visible proof points.
And the man at the centre of all of it is someone who dropped out of school in Australia, spent three years in a coal mine, and built his business education one paperback at a time.
We believe the British startup ecosystem has a complicated relationship with founders like Payne. It celebrates the Cambridge dropout, the Imperial PhD, and the Goldman analyst who left to start a company.
It is less comfortable with the story that doesn't fit the template, the self-taught outsider who arrives without a network, without credentials, without the right background, and builds something that the credentialed insiders could not, and because some of the most important companies of the next decade may be built by people who don't look anything like the founders we expect. This might be the story that matters most.
As the AI boom has produced plenty of headlines, we think this is one of the better stories hiding behind them.
Want to understand why investors are betting billions on Nscale? Read our story: Why Nscale AI Infrastructure Is the Most Important UK Tech Story.
Editorial Note
This article is based on reporting from The New York Times, The Sunday Times, and Inc. Magazine. EP+ has not yet interviewed Josh Payne directly.
We would welcome the opportunity to do so and hear the story in his own words.
Sources: The New York Times (Adam Satariano, March 2026) · The Sunday Times (Hugo Daniel & Lizzie Wilson, March 2026) · Inc. Magazine (Leila Sheridan, March 2026)
