Nvidia's 14-Day Data Center Design Highlights Nscale's Loughton Power Delay

Nvidia’s modular data center design targets deployment in as little as 14 days at prepared sites, but a grid delay at Nscale’s planned Loughton project shows that faster construction does not guarantee power for planned AI capacity.

Microsoft withdrew as anchor customer for the planned center in Loughton, England, after expected power supply shifted into the 2030s. Nscale said it remains committed to the project and is exploring alternative power sources. The company has not announced a replacement power or opening schedule. The Loughton facility was one part of a broader infrastructure agreement spanning Europe and the United States.

The planned Loughton facility was sized at 50 megawatts, scalable to 90 megawatts, with about 23,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs slated for the first quarter of 2027. The broader agreement covered about 200,000 GB300 GPUs across Europe and the United States.

As of Aug. 31, Nscale had about 25,000 active GPUs out of 461,000 active or contracted. It associated $2.6 billion with active capacity within $103.4 billion of total contract value. That total is contract value, not revenue already earned. The 461,000 figure includes contracted units as well as active GPUs, so it does not represent the operating fleet alone. The distinction matters because contracted capacity is not the same as hardware running in a data center.

As of Oct. 1, Nscale had deployed 24,000 GPUs during the prior month and had more than 50,000 GPUs powering production workloads across six active data centers in five countries. Those figures cover different dates and measures, which the disclosures do not reconcile, so they are not directly comparable.

Nvidia introduced its DSX POD reference design on Oct. 21. The company said a factory-integrated unit could be deployed at a prepared site in as little as 14 days, compared with six months. The estimate applies to a prepared location; a site still needs power, cooling and network connections.

That distinction matters for Loughton. A modular build can shorten deployment, but it does not resolve grid access. Nscale is still exploring alternative power sources and has announced no revised date for power availability or opening.