A London-based AI infrastructure company valued at $14.6 billion is bringing up to 250 engineering jobs to downtown Bellevue.
Nscale, which builds and operates data centers for AI workloads, signed a lease for nearly 24,000 square feet at The Eight office tower at NE 8th Street and 108th Avenue NE, according to a GeekWire report published Saturday, July 19.
The office will serve as the company's primary U.S. engineering headquarters when it opens in January 2027.
The company employs about 50 people in the Seattle area; the new space can accommodate up to 250.
Who's running it
Nscale tapped Nidhi Chappell, the former Microsoft corporate vice president who led Azure AI and high-performance computing infrastructure, as its president of AI infrastructure.
Chappell, based in the Seattle area, will oversee global engineering and data center operations from the Bellevue office. Nscale is also preparing to open a New York office.
"The world remembers the breakthroughs, but it's the people building the infrastructure behind the scenes who make them possible," Chappell wrote in a LinkedIn post last weekend, announcing Nscale's first onboarding event in Seattle.
Why Bellevue
Nscale said it chose Bellevue for the region's concentration of AI infrastructure talent and proximity to major customers, including Microsoft.
The two companies announced an expanded collaboration in early 2026 to deploy next-generation AI infrastructure across Europe using NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs.
The lease adds to a wave of AI-related office activity downtown. OpenAI signed a 296,000-square-foot lease at City Center Plaza in February 2026, and companies including xAI, Databricks, CoreWeave, and Anduril have established or expanded Bellevue offices.
Downtown Bellevue's vacancy rate stood at 25.4% at the end of 2025, according to Broderick Group, but new-to-market entrants have been absorbing space steadily.
The numbers
Nscale raised $2 billion in a Series C round announced March 9. The company called it the largest Series C ever raised by a European technology firm.
Backers include NVIDIA, Dell, Citadel, Jane Street, and Point72. Nscale secured an additional $900 million revolving credit facility in July 2026.
The Eight is a 25-story, 540,000-square-foot tower completed in 2024 by Skanska USA Commercial Development. Pokémon is the anchor tenant, occupying roughly 374,000 square feet across about 16 floors.
Nscale's nearly 24,000 square feet represents a smaller but notable addition to the building's tenant roster.
