When is a "British" company a British company? In an age of global capital, it's question of limited merit -- but we're going to ask it anyway.

The British government used Donald Trump's recent state visit to claim credit for a number of recent bits of UK FDI. MainFT:

The £150bn of investment by US companies in Britain hailed by Starmer as being linked to the state visit was a familiar Downing Street tactic -- adding up a series of planned commercial decisions to come up with a big number, then claiming some of the credit.

Many of the numbers came from the tech sector:

Nvidia said it would invest £500mn in UK cloud computing start-up Nscale as part of a deployment of 120,000 of its chips in the UK, giving the country the largest cluster of AI computing power in Europe.

That "UK cloud computing start-up" Nscale featured prominently in Government press bumf this week:

British firm Nscale, and leading American companies OpenAI and NVIDIA partner up to establish Stargate UK to deliver new AI infrastructure in the UK, developing a platform designed to deploy OpenAI's technology on sovereign infrastructure in the UK.

The boss of that "British firm", Josh Payne, is quoted as saying:

We're delighted to announce Nscale's commitment to UK AI infrastructure today, including through Stargate UK and building the most powerful supercomputer in the country with Microsoft.

As a UK-based company, we're showing how we can be makers, not takers, of the most important technology of our time.

In a video posted to LinkedIn by Nscale, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang gave a signed bottle of Johnnie Walker whisky to Payne as a way to mark their new "partnership".

"Zero to fifty billion..." says Huang, seemingly reading his message on a bottle out loud.

"In 18 months, let's do it," says Payne.

"In 18 months... I'm going to increase your odds by using dollars," says Huang.

A £500mn investment from Nvidia under way -- part of a larger funding round, details of which Nscale has not disclosed -- and Huang hinting at a potential $50bn revenue stream? If so, is could this be that seldom-seen thing -- a British tech success story? Might they list in London [let's not take the piss -- Ed]?

Maybe. We have a couple of questions:

1) Is "Makers, not takers" too bold a way of phrasing "we're going to buy a load of chips from a US company valued at nearly double the entire London stock market, in part by getting investment from that US company"?

2) Is Nscale 'British'?

The answer to 1 is obvious, so we're going to focus on 2.

The answer arguably matters. Nscale's data centres are being billed as "sovereign infrastructure", deploying one of the AI industry's favourite buzzwords -- which Nvidia defines as "refers to a nation's capabilities to produce artificial intelligence using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business networks" (and ahem Nvidia's chips).

If you accept that sovereignty matters -- though given it's at least partially marketing, it's perfectly fair to say it doesn't -- then it's worth questioning if the description is accurate.

Nscale was launched out of "stealth mode" in May 2024, getting $155mn in Series A funding last December to develop data centres in Europe and North America.

CNBC rather breathlessly reported on Wednesday that Nscale "came out of nowhere" despite widespread coverage, including within its own article, of its origins:

[W]hat's now Nscale was part of Arkon Energy, which was established a year earlier to provide infrastructure for cryptocurrency mining. Nscale was spun out to address soaring demand for data centers capable of handling AI workloads.

So -- the AI data centre arm of Arkon Energy, a crypto miner/mining enabler. It's good to keep up to date with the latest trends.

Arkon Energy, a data center infrastructure provider based in Melbourne, Australia, is expanding to the U.S. with the acquisition of a site in Hannibal, Ohio.

The company, which operates data centers that host bitcoin mining equipment, also raised $26 million in fresh capital from Sandton Capital Partners, which it intends to use to fund an "aggressive expansion" into North America, according to an announcement shared with CoinDesk on Tuesday. That's on top of the $28 million it raised in November, when it bought Hydrokraft AS, a renewable energy-based data center in Norway.

At the time, Payne -- also chief executive officer of Arkon, natch -- said:

The successful acquisition of the site in Hannibal, Ohio is a significant milestone in the Arkon Energy story and establishes the Company as a leading globally diversified data center provider.

Fast forward a couple of years, AI is a lot more hype-y than crypto, that Norwegian data centre has changed hands from Arkon to Nscale, and Nscale -- with a London office -- qualifies as "British" enough for a Government press release.

It's an lightly-worn identity. Nscale also announced an infrastructure deal with Microsoft on Wednesday, in which the US tech giant will use that Norwegian data centre we mentioned above.

The press release for that deal says:

About Nscale

Nscale is the global hyperscaler engineered for sovereign-grade AI infrastructure, delivering compute to the generative AI market at scale. Through its fully vertically integrated suite of AI solutions and GW+ greenfield data centres across Europe and North America, Nscale enables customers to run efficient and scalable AI training, fine-tuning, and inferencing workloads.

"Global"????

We're not denying a UK connection. The Companies House application to create Nscale Global Holdings Limited lists the UK as the country where Josh Payne is "usually resident", and Payne's LinkedIn also says he is now London-based.

But ownership obviously matters more than position. TK Maxx is now a British high street institution, but nobody claims it is British.

A simple way to answer this question is to look at who owns Nscale. As of June, the entire share capital of Nscale Global Holdings Limited (the name cited in press release, and the only UK company of which Payne is an active director) was owned by Australia's Arkon Energy Pty LTD, according to a confirmation statement posted on Companies House:

We asked Nscale's spokespeople whether it is misleading to call Nscale British given it is apparently owned and operated by Australians. They told us:

Nscale is UK-based, this is where it is headquartered, this is where it is registered. The investors, like the majority of businesses, are from all over the world. As you might have seen with recent investment announcements in Nscale earlier this week. We are not in a position right now to comment any further on Nscale's investors.

If this doesn't fit with your definition, please refer to us as a UK-headquartered AI infrastructure provider.

Again -- and we can't emphasise this enough -- this doesn't particularly matter. Especially because Nscale may soon be functionally more American than it is Australian or British.

Is the 'British firm' at the heart of Britain's AI plans actually British?