Nscale, the UK-based AI data centre startup, has added Fidji Simo to its board. The company designs, builds and operates infrastructure for artificial intelligence workloads.
The appointment lands while the company is preparing to go public.
Who Simo is
Simo most recently served as OpenAI's CEO of AGI deployment, a position that made her effectively the organisation's second-in-command. She departed in July for health reasons and continues there as a part-time advisor.
Before that she led Instacart as chair and CEO through its 2023 IPO. Earlier she spent over a decade at Meta in senior roles, including a period heading the Facebook app. She also sits on Shopify's board.
What that history shares is not infrastructure but scale. Throughout her career Simo's job has been keeping products used by millions standing up; on the data centre side, the job is meeting the load those products create.
Who brought her in
The person who recruited Simo to the board was Sheryl Sandberg. Nscale's board already includes, alongside Sandberg, Susan Decker and Nick Clegg.
| Name | Background |
|---|---|
| Fidji Simo | OpenAI, Instacart, Meta |
| Sheryl Sandberg | Former chief operating officer of Meta |
| Nick Clegg | Former president of global affairs at Meta |
| Susan Decker | Former president of Yahoo |
The weight of that list is notable: an infrastructure company's board filled with heavyweights from the product and public affairs side.
The shape of that board also shows how the company positions itself. Nscale wants to be described not as a technical supplier but as an operator of the infrastructure behind large products.
Why this profile
Nscale CEO Josh Payne's reasoning explains it. In his words Simo is "one of the few leaders who understand what it means to scale products used by billions of people" and knows the infrastructure demand those products create.
So the company is adding not an engineer but a product person who knows where demand comes from. In the data centre business the real uncertainty is not building capacity but who will rent that capacity, and for how long.
Assembling a board like that before an IPO is a familiar move as well. Part of the story told to investors is the company's technical capacity, and part of it is who is steering that capacity.
Numbers and timing
Nscale was founded only two years ago. It is reported to be seeking up to 3.5 billion dollars in pre-IPO financing and planning to go public this autumn.
That is one example of how quickly capital is gathering in AI infrastructure. It is also a test: a two-year-old company defending its valuation in public markets will depend not on a model but on the length of its customer contracts.