Nscale Seeks $3.5B Ahead of IPO as Its Contract Backlog Doubles to $103B in One Month

Nscale, the London based AI infrastructure company, is in talks with investors to raise as much as 3.5 billion dollars in financing ahead of a planned initial public offering that could come as early as this month, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg.

The financing package reportedly includes up to 1.5 billion dollars in convertible notes, a type of debt that can later convert into company stock, led by Daniel Loeb's hedge fund Third Point, alongside approximately 2 billion dollars in separate financing from Nvidia. Goldman Sachs is working on the fundraising. According to sources cited by multiple outlets, the convertible notes are being offered at the equivalent of the IPO price minus a double‑digit percentage discount, with that discount adjustable up to a 30 billion dollar valuation cap, above which the conversion price would remain fixed regardless of how much higher the company's valuation eventually climbs. Bloomberg has separately reported the IPO itself could raise an additional 3 billion dollars on top of this pre‑IPO round.

Nscale was founded in 2024 by chief executive Josh Payne, and has grown at a remarkable pace even by the standards of the current AI infrastructure boom. The company raised 155 million dollars in its Series A round in December 2024, then closed a 1.1 billion dollar Series B in March led by investment fund Aker, a round Nscale itself described as the largest Series B in European history, with Nvidia also participating. That was followed by a 2 billion dollar Series C in March 2026 at a 14.6 billion dollar valuation. If the company's IPO prices at or near the 30 billion dollar convertible note cap now being discussed, that would represent roughly a doubling of Nscale's valuation in a matter of months.

Central to Nscale's rapid ascent is a business model built around vertical integration: rather than simply reselling data center capacity or GPU access sourced from elsewhere, the company controls the full stack from data center construction through GPU deployment to cloud services delivered directly to customers. Most of Nscale's currently active chips come from Nvidia's Blackwell series, and the company has contracted for approximately 194,000 of Nvidia's next‑generation Vera Rubin GPUs, according to Bloomberg. The company is developing a large data center campus in Narvik, Norway that will be used by Microsoft, alongside a sizable campus in West Virginia.

That West Virginia campus sits at the center of the single largest catalyst behind Nscale's recent growth. On August 26, Nscale agreed to a six‑year, 45 billion dollar deal to supply computing capacity to Anthropic, an agreement that alone accounts for most of the dramatic jump in the company's contracted revenue backlog, which Nscale has been telling prospective investors now totals approximately 103 billion dollars, up from roughly 51 billion dollars reported just four weeks earlier. That near‑doubling within a single month underscores both how quickly demand for dedicated AI compute capacity has been consolidating around a small number of very large, long‑term supply agreements, and how central that Anthropic deal specifically has become to the investment case Nscale is presenting to prospective pre‑IPO backers.

Nscale's momentum extends beyond large model labs and into physical AI as well. The company recently struck a separate compute partnership with humanoid robotics firm Figure, committing at least 3.5 billion dollars in AI cloud infrastructure and taking a strategic equity stake in Figure as part of the arrangement, illustrating how Nscale is positioning itself as critical infrastructure across multiple distinct corners of the AI industry rather than depending on any single customer segment.

Nscale's board carries an unusually high public profile for a company only two years old, including Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta, and Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister who later served as Meta's president of global affairs. According to BigGo Finance, Nscale has projected annual revenue of roughly 18.1 billion dollars with adjusted EBITDA of approximately 13.6 billion dollars, figures the company has shared with prospective investors as part of its IPO preparation, though these remain company projections rather than independently audited results. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have reportedly been involved in IPO preparations since February 2026, according to CryptoBriefing, suggesting the listing has been in planning for considerably longer than the pre‑IPO financing talks alone would suggest.

Nvidia's willingness to contribute roughly 2 billion dollars in direct pre‑IPO financing, on top of its earlier participation in Nscale's Series B and Series C rounds, continues a now‑familiar pattern of the chipmaker deploying capital directly into companies that are simultaneously major customers for its hardware, a strategy Nvidia has used repeatedly across its AI ecosystem investments and one that has drawn scrutiny from some market observers concerned about how much of the AI infrastructure sector's reported demand is effectively circular, funded in part by the same company selling the underlying chips. Whether Nscale's IPO proceeds on the timeline currently being discussed, and whether its valuation ultimately settles at, above, or below the 30 billion dollar cap embedded in this financing round, will offer one of the clearest public tests yet of how public market investors are willing to price a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company whose growth has been driven overwhelmingly by a small number of enormous, multi‑year contracts rather than a broad, diversified customer base.