Cloud: Europe’s 6 most-funded companies in H1 2026

Europe’s cloud funding in H1 2026 was really a story about infrastructure, not software. Roughly €5.9 billion went into just eight transactions, and one of them didn’t even disclose the amount. The money also did most of the talking in one country: the UK took more than 99 per cent of the total, pulled along by Nscale and Pure Data Centres.

Nscale was the biggest raiser by far, bringing in $4.19 billion across three deals. That included a $2 billion Series C in March, plus two debt financings in February and May. The company builds AI cloud infrastructure, from GPU capacity to data centres and cloud services for training and deploying AI models. It also says it is building facilities powered by renewable energy, with expansion projects across Europe and North America.

Pure Data Centres came next with $2.7 billion. The London-headquartered company develops and runs hyperscale data centres, backed by Oaktree Capital, and it is buying land, building facilities and leasing infrastructure to technology companies. The pitch is simple and expensive: more computing capacity for cloud providers and AI operators. Debt financing mattered a lot here, which makes sense when the business is concrete, steel and power bills.

Then there’s the rest of the field, which looks tiny by comparison. Blocks raised $6 million from Speedinvest, Caesar Ventures and angel investors including the founders of Flix, to help companies keep better track of cloud spending. Germany’s enclaive followed with a €4.1 million seed round in February for confidential computing, while Czech startup Zerops raised $2 million in May to grow its platform and infrastructure. The gap between those rounds and the billion-dollar deals is the whole picture.

Cast AI rounded out the list with an undisclosed round that pushed its valuation above $1 billion in January, making it Lithuania’s fifth unicorn. The company builds cloud automation tools for Kubernetes and now offers OMNI Compute, which can connect outside computing capacity, including GPUs, across cloud environments. Europe’s cloud market is still alive, but the chequebooks are mostly being opened for power, land and hardware.