Josh Payne's career started underground. Before the data centres, the Microsoft contracts and the US$14.6 billion valuation, he left high school in an industrial part of Australia and went to work in coal mines. Profiles describe it as his early career, though they do not say for how long or where.
It is a strange place to start for a man who now runs one of Britain's most valuable AI infrastructure companies. The skill he carried out of the mines was not code. It was a feel for power, land and the heavy things that make production possible. Years later he moved to London, though sources do not say when or why.
It is a strange place to start for a man who now runs one of Britain's most valuable AI infrastructure companies.
His first company was Arkon Energy, which he founded in 2020 and ran as executive chairman until late 2024. It supplied infrastructure for renewable-powered bitcoin mining and, more usefully, secured power and sites. That was the hidden asset. When the AI boom turned energy into the scarcest input in computing, Arkon's contracts looked like a map of where the electricity was.
The obvious pivot was not entirely comfortable. Mining and AI are different customers with different tolerances, and Arkon eventually wound down. Nscale was launched in 2024, with Nathan Townsend named by Computer Weekly as a co-founder, and took over a Norwegian site from Arkon.
Then the money arrived at an unusual speed. A US$155 million Series A in December 2024. A US$1.1 billion Series B in September 2025 from Aker, NVIDIA, Nokia and Dell. A US$433 million SAFE. And a US$2 billion Series C in March 2026, bringing Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker and Nick Clegg onto the board. Microsoft became the anchor customer, with deals covering over 200,000 NVIDIA chips and sites in Norway, Portugal, the UK and the US.
The price has been scrutiny. Some press questioned its credibility and how British it really is. Revenue is real but small against the promises: US$19.1 million in 2024, US$33.0 million in 2025 and US$140.6 million in the first half of 2026, set against what its filings describe as US$103.4 billion in contracted take-or-pay agreements.
The memorable detail is one nobody planned. The company shares its name with a model-railway scale, a hobby of tiny tracks, while building campuses meant to reach 2 gigawatts.
The lesson for a first-time founder is that your unglamorous first career may be your edge. Payne knew what physical infrastructure costs and where the power is, which is often exactly what the glamorous software crowd cannot learn quickly.