British AI neocloud Nscale is buying Anyscale, the software company built around the open-source Ray distributed computing framework, TechCrunch reports. Bloomberg cited a $1.65 billion price tag, attributed to an anonymous source.
Anyscale helps companies run and scale AI workloads across data centers and servers. After the GPT-3 boom, it shifted further toward large-model serving, training, data curation, inference, reinforcement learning, observability, and orchestration.
The deal fits Nscale’s strategy of moving vertically through the AI compute stack. The company already works across energy, data centers, and infrastructure partnerships, and Anyscale adds a software layer for managing workloads on top of that hardware.
Anyscale said the combination should let the two companies co-design infrastructure and the software layer beneath customer workloads. Nscale said Anyscale will keep its brand and customers, and that roughly 200 employees will join Nscale. The transaction shows how AI infrastructure competition is expanding beyond access to GPUs into the systems that keep them productive.