Norway · operational · ai training

Svartisen

Deep dive: How Nebius and Nscale build GPU clouds

Also known as Nscale Svartisen Cluster

Operated by Nscale at Nscale Glomfjord DC .

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Measured performance

Rmax: 7.40 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 12.38 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 59.8%
Cores: 66,528
Power: -
Per watt: - GF/W

Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.

What this machine is made of

One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.

Role	Part	Supplier at build	Quantity	Confidence	Source
Integrator	- Supermicro AS-4124GQ-TNMI	Supermicro SMCINASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
Accelerator	AMD Instinct MI250X Accelerators ROCm (CDNA 2) · 1.7 GHz · TSMC N6 · 560 W AMD Instinct MI250X, 4x OAM (8 GPUs) per node	AMD AMDNASDAQ	-	Verified	top500.org nscale.com
CPU	AMD EPYC 7713 (Milan) CPUs x86-64 · 64C · 2 GHz · 7 nm · 225 W AMD EPYC 7713 64C 3.7GHz, 2x per node	AMD AMDNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
Operating system	Rocky Linux Operating systems RHEL-compatible Linux, community-maintained · Downstream rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux source Rocky Linux 8.9	Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

Nscale's first HPL-measured cluster, and the dataset's first system where Nscale itself, rather than a hyperscaler tenant, is recorded as the operator: the other two Nscale rows in this dataset (the Loughton and Narvik campuses) are recorded under Microsoft as operator since Microsoft is the named tenant there. Built at Glomfjord, a village inside the Arctic Circle powered by a nearby hydroelectric dam, on AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators and EPYC 7713 hosts rather than the NVIDIA hardware that dominates the rest of this dataset's neocloud rows. TOP500's own system page and Nscale's own blog post independently agree on the AMD MI250X accelerator, the EPYC 7713 CPU and the 66,528 core count, so the tier is verified; TOP500 gives Rmax as 7,400,700 GFlop/s and Rpeak as 12,380,120 GFlop/s, converted here to PFlop/s. The system has appeared on every TOP500 list from November 2024 (rank 156) through June 2026 (rank 239), which is the source for the operational status.

Timeline

2024 First operational source
2024-11 List debut at #156 (November 2024) source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#156: TOP500, November 2024 →

Site & facility

Nscale Glomfjord DC

Location: Glomfjord, Norway
Commissioned: 2024

top500.org nscale.com

Change history

2026-09-24 Svartisen added (Nscale, Norway)

Source check

We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
top500.org	names system and part	AMD Instinct MI250X, AMD EPYC 7713 (Milan), Rocky Linux
nscale.com	names system and part	AMD Instinct MI250X, AMD EPYC 7713 (Milan)

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.