Nvidia is making another big move into AI — this time in the UK.
According to Bloomberg, the company is investing $683 million into Nscale, an AI infrastructure firm that spun off from crypto miner Arkon Energy in 2024. The plan? To massively expand the UK’s AI capacity.
With this deal, Nscale is targeting 60,000 GPUs by 2026 across its European data centers. Their CEO summed it up: strong, local AI infrastructure is key for resilience, growth, and keeping pace in the new industrial era.
This also fits the UK government’s ambition to lead in AI. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Keir Starmer outlined 50 recommendations to capture AI opportunities, with billions in commitments from Nscale, Vantage Data Centres, and Kyndryl.
For Nvidia, it’s another milestone after hitting a $4 trillion market cap in July.
But here’s the concern: while this is great for scaling, it’s also highly centralized. Data and computation end up controlled by a handful of corporations.
That’s where projects like LazAI show a different path. Instead of concentrating power, LazAI puts data contributors at the center. Through the Data Anchoring Token (DAT) — a new semi-fungible token standard — people can contribute data, keep full control over its use (training, inference, evaluation), and still earn rewards.
DAT isn’t just proof of ownership. It encodes:
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Ownership Certificate → Verifiable claim over datasets, models, or computation results
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Usage Right → Defined quotas for invoking AI services
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Value Share → A fair slice of future revenue tied to contributions
Unlike NFTs or ERC-20s, DATs are built specifically for AI — combining identity, usage rights, and economic alignment in one asset.
So while Nvidia and Nscale build top-down infrastructure, LazAI is building bottom-up infrastructure where users control their data, benefit from its value, and shape governance through iDAO.
The real question is: do we want AI to be built around centralized infrastructure, or around decentralized frameworks that keep ownership with the people?