British AI neocloud Nscale is acquiring Anyscale, the company behind the open-source Ray distributed computing framework, for $1.65 billion in a move to vertically integrate the AI compute stack. Bloomberg reported the price, citing an anonymous source. Anyscale was founded by the same team that built Ray and initially focused on a platform for large-scale computing projects. After GPT-3’s launch in 2022, it pivoted to scaling services for training and serving large language models, data curation, inferencing, and reinforcement learning. Its platform is built around Ray, providing developer tools, observability, and orchestration.

Nscale has been building vertically across energy, data centers, and orchestration software; adding Anyscale gives it workload management and scaling capabilities. Anyscale said in a statement that the two companies can co-design the software and infrastructure layers more effectively together than each could alone. Nscale raised $2 billion in a Series C round in March, valuing it at $14.6 billion, with investors including Nvidia, Nokia, Blue Owl, Dell, and Aker. The neocloud has since formed compute and data center partnerships with Microsoft, British Telecom, and Nordcraft.

Anyscale, valued at $1.38 billion in a 2022 Series C, reported a 70% revenue increase in its most recent quarter compared to the previous sequential quarter. Nscale said Anyscale will continue to operate under its own branding and serve existing customers. All of Anyscale‘s approximately 200 employees are joining Nscale.