Nscale is a United Kingdom-headquartered AI infrastructure company that builds and operates GPU data centres in Europe and North America and sells the capacity under long-term contracts to model developers and cloud providers. The company describes itself as "the global hyperscaler engineered for AI infrastructure", delivering vertically integrated compute, networking, storage, managed software and AI services from owned and colocated facilities (Source: nscale.com). Founded in 2024, it has become the counterparty to several of the largest disclosed AI compute agreements, including an approximately 200,000-GPU contract with Microsoft, participation in OpenAI's Stargate projects in the United Kingdom and Norway, and a reported $45 billion, six-year agreement with Anthropic announced on August 26, 2026.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Type | AI cloud and data-centre infrastructure provider ("neocloud") |
| HQ | United Kingdom (London) |
| Founded | 2024 |
| CEO / co-founder | Josh Payne |
| Principal customers | Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic |
| Principal investors | Aker ASA (lead, Series B), Nvidia, Dell Technologies, Nokia, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Blue Owl, G Squared, Point72, Sandton Capital, T.Capital |
| Flagship site | Monarch Compute Campus, Mason County, West Virginia |
Snapshot
Funding
| Date | Round | Amount | Valuation | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-25 | Pre-IPO convertible loan notes | $3.36B | not stated | Led by Third Point, with new and existing investors including Nvidia, funds managed by Apollo, Citadel, Hudson Bay Capital, Abu Dhabi Investment Council and 8090 Industries, and participation from Davidson Kempner, Qube Research & Technologies, Context Capital Management, Longaeva Partners, Wellington Management, Castleknight, Ghisallo Capital Management, LionTree Investment Fund, Javelin Venture Partners and Irving Investors. An initial $2.36B tranche at closing plus a $1B commitment from Nvidia with funding expected in mid-November 2026; the notes convert automatically into ordinary shares (non-voting shares for Nvidia) on completion of the IPO. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC was placement agent. The company cites over $103B in total contracted value. Per TechCrunch, the FT reported an expected $35B valuation on the NYSE and Bloomberg a $3B offering. | nscale.com; TechCrunch |
| 2026-09-18 | IPO registration (Form S-1) | not stated in filing | not stated | Nscale Limited filed a registration statement with the SEC on September 18, 2026 for an initial public offering of ordinary shares to be listed on the NYSE under the symbol NSCL. CNBC reported that the company said in March 2026 that investors had valued it at $14.6 billion in a funding round, and that Nvidia agreed to guarantee up to $860 million of Nscale's obligations under a Texas data-centre lease, per the filing. | Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026); CNBC |
| 2026-09-04 | Pre-IPO financing (in talks) | $3.5B sought | not disclosed | Bloomberg reported talks to raise $1.5B in convertible notes from a group of investors plus a further $2B sought from Nvidia, ahead of an initial public offering the company has said may come as early as September 2026. Nscale has told potential investors it has roughly $103 billion in contracted revenue following the Anthropic agreement — a figure The Information reported is a projection based on signed customer leases rather than current sales. No round announced. | TechCrunch |
| 2025-09-25 | Series B | $1.1B | ~$3B (per UKAI) | Led by Aker ASA; described by the company as the largest Series B in UK and European history. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC acted as exclusive placement agent. | nscale.com; CNBC; UKAI |
Financials (from the Form S-1)
| Period | Revenue | Net loss | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| H1 2026 (six months to June 30) | $140.6M | $(1,020.1)M | Revenue up 1,252% from $10.4M in H1 2025; adjusted EBITDA $(199.2)M; largest customer 52% of revenue; accumulated deficit $1,860.9M at June 30, 2026 | Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026) |
| FY 2025 | $33.0M | $(761.8)M | Largest customer 73% of revenue | Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026) |
| H1 2025 | $10.4M | $(368.9)M | Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026) | |
| FY 2024 | $19.1M | $(78.2)M | A single customer accounted for substantially all revenue | Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026) |
Remaining performance obligations were $56.4 billion at June 30, 2026, which Nscale expects to recognize over the next seven years, up from $34.5 billion at December 31, 2025. As of August 31, 2026 the company reported about 25,000 active GPUs and 461,000 active and contracted GPUs, five active and twelve contracted data-centre sites (seven wholly owned, nine colocation, one leased) and about 1.37 GW of active and contracted capacity, and over 1,000 full-time employees; the chief executive's letter in the filing puts total contracted value at over $103 billion and the owned and controlled power pipeline at "10 GW+" Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026). CNBC reported more than $8 billion of debt, excluding a financing arrangement with Dell (CNBC).
Compute contracts
| Date announced | Counterparty | Reported terms | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-25 (per S-1) | Anthropic | GPU Services Agreements dated August 25, 2026 for dedicated GPU infrastructure services at the Monarch Compute Campus supporting Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs, providing for aggregate payments to Nscale of up to approximately $44.6 billion; Anthropic may terminate a tranche if Nscale misses its delivery timeline, with limited relief for supply-chain delays. | Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026) |
| 2026-08-26 | Anthropic | ~$45B over six years; Nvidia Vera Rubin systems from the West Virginia campus; capacity expected to begin serving Anthropic in late 2027. First reported by Bloomberg; TechCrunch and Reuters each confirmed through a person familiar with the deal. Neither party has published terms. | TechCrunch; Reuters |
| 2026-03-16 | Microsoft | Letter of intent for up to 1.35 GW of AI compute on Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems at the Monarch campus, delivered across multiple tranches beginning in late 2027, under an initial multi-year compute-services term alongside a long-term data-centre lease. | nscale.com |
| 2025-10-15 | Microsoft | ~200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs across four countries and two continents, delivered through Nscale's own operations and the Aker joint venture; reported by UKAI at a value of up to $14B. | nscale.com; UKAI |
Business and positioning
Nscale sells GPU capacity rather than models. It describes a vertically integrated stack — compute, networking, storage, orchestration and managed AI services — delivered from data centres it owns or colocates in, and states that its European siting gives access to low-cost renewable energy that it passes to customers while meeting regional regulatory requirements (Source: nscale.com). Alongside physical capacity the company has launched a fine-tuning service, inference APIs, an AI Studio, orchestration tooling and private-cloud features.
The company sits in the category of specialist AI-cloud providers, alongside CoreWeave, Nebius Group, Crusoe, Applied Digital, Lancium and Volta Infra, that supply capacity to hyperscalers and model developers rather than competing with them for end customers. UKAI reported in October 2025 that the company had emerged roughly a year earlier as a spin-out from an Australian Bitcoin mining business, and that Microsoft was leasing AI compute from Nscale alongside CoreWeave, Nebius and Lambda as part of a broader cloud-infrastructure programme (Source: ukai.co). The conversion of cryptocurrency-mining sites and operators into AI data-centre capacity is a pattern the sector shares; see Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics.
Nvidia is both a supplier and an investor. It participated in the Series B, and The Information reported in July 2026 that Nvidia was Nscale's largest preferred shareholder late in 2025 — reporting that surfaced in the context of Google pitching TPUs to neoclouds including Nscale, and offering to financially backstop TPU data centres (Source: The Information, "Behind Google's Ground War to Lure Nvidia's Most Loyal Customers," July 13, 2026). See Circular Financing in AI, Google DeepMind.
Sites and capacity
Monarch Compute Campus, West Virginia
On March 16, 2026, at Nvidia's GTC conference, Nscale announced the acquisition of American Intelligence & Power Corporation, sponsored by Fidelis New Energy and 8090 Industries. The acquisition brought with it the Monarch Compute Campus, a site of up to 2,250 acres in Mason County, West Virginia, which the company describes as carrying the United States' first state-certified AI microgrid, with a power runway scalable to more than eight gigawatts. Nscale stated at the time that the campus would build on its existing capacity of over one gigawatt (Source: nscale.com).
The same announcement established Nscale Energy & Power and set out a power arrangement with Caterpillar: G3500 series natural gas generator sets deployed at sufficient scale to reach two gigawatts of generation by the first half of 2028. Nscale states that power will be generated on site and that the facility will operate independently of the local grid, which it describes as eliminating the burden on existing utility customers, with the microgrid designed to allow a future tie-in for export back to the grid. The company also says it is pursuing carbon sequestration in West Virginia to offset emissions, and that the campus uses a high-efficiency design consuming less water, with no stated impact on municipal water supply. Fibre connectivity to Ashburn and Chicago is cited as a latency advantage. These are the company's own representations; no independent assessment of the site's emissions, water use or ratepayer effects is established here. See AI Environmental Impact, Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics.
European and other sites
The October 2025 Microsoft agreement set out a distributed footprint: approximately 104,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs in a roughly 240 MW campus in Texas leased from Ionic Digital, with deliveries from the third quarter of 2026 and a plan to scale the site to 1.2 GW, Microsoft holding an option on a second 700 MW phase from late 2027; approximately 12,600 GB300 GPUs at the Start Campus data centre in Sines, Portugal, from the first quarter of 2026, framed as sovereign AI capacity inside the EU; and approximately 23,000 GB300 GPUs at the Loughton AI Campus in Essex, a 50 MW facility scalable to 90 MW, from the first quarter of 2027, powering Microsoft Azure services. A separate Aker–Nscale joint-venture agreement covers approximately 52,000 GB300 GPUs from a campus in Narvik, Norway (Source: nscale.com).
Stargate participation
Nscale is a construction and operating partner in two of OpenAI's Stargate projects. In July 2025 it announced Stargate Norway with Aker ASA and OpenAI, with a stated target of 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2026; CNBC reported Nscale's own commitment to the Norwegian project at $1 billion, with the GPU target set before 2027. Separately, Nscale, OpenAI and Nvidia announced Stargate UK, described as an infrastructure platform for deploying OpenAI's technology in the United Kingdom with a focus on sovereign workloads (Source: nscale.com; cnbc.com). See Sovereign AI.
The registration statement records that "in April 2026, OpenAI withdrew from the Stargate Norway and Stargate UK partnerships, with Microsoft subsequently expanding its agreement with us to take the extra compute capacity at Stargate Norway" Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026).
The UK project has drawn scrutiny. Freedom-of-information responses reported on July 4, 2026 showed that neither OpenAI nor Nscale had met local authorities at Cobalt Park in North Tyneside, the flagship site of the paused Stargate UK project, and that £20 billion of the UK government's stated £30 billion of "potential" investment was hypothetical — a figure the government said reflected what the site would need rather than committed funds. Only Nvidia had visited the North East combined authority, in February 2026, and the site lacked a grid connection (Source: theguardian.com).
The Anthropic agreement
Bloomberg reported on August 26, 2026 that Anthropic had agreed to pay Nscale approximately $45 billion for AI computing power. TechCrunch, citing a source familiar with the deal, reported that Nscale would supply the capacity using Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems and that it was expected to begin powering Anthropic's services in late 2027; Bloomberg reported the term as six years, with the capacity drawn from the West Virginia campus. Reuters described the arrangement as renting computing power from the West Virginia campus and connected it to Anthropic's preparation for a public offering (Source: techcrunch.com; reuters.com).
The agreement continues a pattern of Anthropic contracting with non-hyperscaler providers alongside its hyperscaler commitments: a reported $10 billion, six-year arrangement with Volta Infra for capacity in Norway earlier in August 2026, a $5 billion compute-related partnership with AMD in July, and a compute agreement with SpaceX in May. See Anthropic, AI Bubble Debate, Compute Governance.
Nscale is telling prospective investors that it holds about $103 billion in total contracted revenue following the Anthropic deal, up from $51 billion before it, ahead of an initial public offering that could come as soon as September 2026. The figure became public on September 3, 2026; one person familiar with the discussions described the numbers as illustrative rather than formal guidance (Source: theinformation.com). Only the article abstract was retrievable. Nscale's registration statement of September 18, 2026 later put total contracted value at "over $103 billion" in the chief executive's letter to investors, and disclosed the Anthropic agreements' aggregate value as up to approximately $44.6 billion Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026).
Initial public offering
Nscale filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL on September 18, 2026. Its founder, chair and chief executive Josh Payne wrote in a letter included with the filing that the company had been built "against contracted customer demand, underwriting projects to attractive long-term returns, maintaining prudent leverage and seeking to match the duration of our capital commitments with the strong revenues supporting them." CNBC noted that both OpenAI and Anthropic have struck deals with Nscale, that one unnamed customer accounted for over half of first-half 2026 revenue, and that the board includes former Meta executives Nick Clegg and Sheryl Sandberg and Fidji Simo, who stepped down as OpenAI's product and business chief in July 2026 and whose appointment Nscale announced the previous week (CNBC). The filing records a definitive agreement of July 28, 2026 to acquire Anyscale, the company behind the open-source distributed-computing framework Ray, and the March 31, 2026 acquisition of AIPCorp, which secured the Monarch campus Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026). A week after the filing, on September 25, 2026, Nscale announced $3.36 billion in pre-IPO convertible loan notes led by Third Point: an initial $2.36 billion tranche at closing and a $1 billion commitment from Nvidia expected in mid-November 2026, converting into shares automatically on completion of the offering (Source: nscale.com). The financing is smaller in its Nvidia component than the $2 billion Bloomberg had reported the company was seeking from Nvidia in early September (Source: techcrunch.com). According to TechCrunch, the Financial Times reported that Nscale is expected to be valued at $35 billion on the NYSE and Bloomberg that it is seeking to raise $3 billion in the offering (Source: techcrunch.com).
Open questions
- The capacity behind the Anthropic contract is not established. Nscale's registration statement discloses the agreements' date (August 25, 2026), site, GPU type and aggregate value (up to approximately $44.6 billion), but the six-year term and late-2027 start still reach the record only through people familiar with the deal, and no megawatt figure is recorded here.
- The terms of the March 2026 funding round at which, according to CNBC, Nscale said investors valued it at $14.6 billion are not recorded here from a primary source; the registration statement's capitalization sections have not yet been read for them (CNBC).
- Nscale's own capacity claims — "over 1 GW" current capacity as of March 2026, and the eight-gigawatt power runway at Monarch — are company statements about a site whose generating plant is scheduled to reach two gigawatts only in the first half of 2028. The gap between certified power runway and installed generation is not reconciled in the company's material.
Relationships
- depends-on: Nscale Limited — Form S-1 registration statement (2026) — the registration statement behind the Snapshot figures.
- deploys-in: Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic — contracted compute supply.
- depends-on: Nvidia & TSMC — AI Compute Infrastructure — GB300 and Vera Rubin systems, and an investor in the company.
- related: CoreWeave, Nebius Group, Crusoe, Applied Digital, Lancium, Volta Infra — specialist AI-cloud providers in the same market.
- instance-of: Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics — greenfield and microgrid-powered siting; Sovereign AI — the Portuguese and UK deployments are framed in sovereign terms.
- related: Circular Financing in AI — Nvidia is both supplier and shareholder; AI Environmental Impact — on-site gas generation and the carbon-sequestration commitment.