LONDON, UK, October 17, 2024 – Nscale, the European hyperscaler engineered for AI, today announced the appointments of Karl Havard as Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Ron Huisman as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), bolstering the executive team to support plans for significant expansion.
“Karl and Ron are joining our leadership team at a pivotal moment,” comments Joshua Payne, CEO of Nscale. “Our team, infrastructure and partnerships have expanded rapidly as we continue to provide customers with unmatched access to sustainable, high-performance, and cost-effective AI compute. With Karl and Ron’s phenomenal experience on board, we’re well positioned to maintain this fast-paced growth and keep delivering exceptional value to our customers as we build the global infrastructure backbone for generative AI.”
Karl Havard has more than 25 years of experience in engineering, sales and leadership. This includes senior leadership roles at Amazon Web Services and Google, leading GFT Group’s Google Cloud Alliance, and building multiple start-ups in the HPC and Generative AI cloud service provider industry.
“A lot of companies talk about ethical, sustainable AI innovation, but not many are really doing it,” said Karl Havard, COO at Nscale. “I’m excited to be part of Nscale’s mission to democratise AI compute through scalable, purpose-built AI infrastructure that has sustainability at its heart. Combining truly sustainable AI with European sovereignty and compliance is a unique and powerful offering. We’re building something extraordinary, and proving that technological innovation doesn’t need to go hand-in-hand with depleting the earth’s resources.”
Ron Huisman most recently served as CFO at AtlasEdge. Prior to this, Ron had a 20-year career at Liberty Global, including five years as CFO of Liberty's Central Division (Global Technology & Innovation group). He brings deep knowledge of digital infrastructure and the TMT sector, as well as significant experience leading transformation programmes and executing M&A deals.
“AI promises to transform entire industries and even economies,” said Ron Huisman, CFO at Nscale. “It’s an exciting space, but one which comes with significant responsibility. Sustainable by design and built with full vertical integration across its powerful AI infrastructure, Nscale is a trusted partner for organisations that require scalable, on-demand, high-performance compute. I’m thrilled to join Nscale as it embarks on its next stage of growth.”
The expansion of Nscale’s executive team reflects significant momentum for the company. Nscale recently announced a strategic partnership with Singtel to unlock both companies’ GPU capacity across Europe and Southeast Asia. In July, Nscale acquired Kontena, a leader in high-density modular data centres and AI data centre solutions, as well as announcing its partnership with Open Innovation AI, a leading GPU orchestration platform in MENA, targeting the deployment of 30,000 GPUs over the next three years.
