The centerpiece of Nscale’s pitch to public investors is a number the company says it has already locked in: $103.4 billion of contracted AI-computing revenue. The London-based cloud provider filed its S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last Friday, planning to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL, and the figure sits near the top of the prospectus.
The number is what Nscale’s backers point to when they argue the company deserves a valuation of up to $35 billion. Whether the market agrees will depend on how solid that order book turns out to be, because the contracts behind it are commitments to draw down capacity over years, not cash in the bank.
The largest piece arrived in August, when Anthropic signed a capacity agreement worth about $45 billion. The deal, spread over several years, gave Nscale an anchor customer and immediately doubled the scale of its contracted revenue. It also handed the startup a validation that few of its rivals can claim: one of the world’s best-funded AI developers has agreed to rent its computing power.
A second transaction, worth $3 billion, is tied to Nvidia, the chipmaker that is simultaneously Nscale’s supplier, customer and investor. The filing describes a web of relationships with Nvidia that runs through the company’s entire business, from the GPUs it installs to the capacity it sells and the capital it has raised.
The order book is the argument for the valuation. A company trading at $35 billion would be worth roughly 2.4 times the last private round, which valued Nscale at about $14.6 billion, a leap that analysts said can only be justified by the contracted revenue the company has already signed.
Yet the prospectus also tells the other side of the story. Nscale lost about $1 billion in the first half of the year, and the filing includes language about its ability to continue as a going concern. A portion of that loss stemmed from foreign-exchange movements rather than operations, but the core business is still spending far more than it earns.
The tension between the two sets of numbers is the central question of the offering. Nscale is building data centers at a pace that guarantees large losses in the near term, on the bet that the revenue from its signed contracts will eventually catch up. Analysts said that bet looks more plausible because of the Anthropic deal than it would on the strength of the smaller customers alone.
The contracts themselves carry conditions. Anthropic and Nscale’s other counterparties are obligated to draw down capacity over the life of the agreements, but the revenue is recognized only as they do so. If demand for AI computing cools, or if a customer’s own growth stalls, the gap between the $103.4 billion headline and what actually lands on the income statement could widen.
Nscale’s dependence on a few large customers is another point investors are expected to press during the roadshow. A single agreement, the Anthropic deal, accounts for a large share of the contracted total, and the company’s Microsoft arrangement carries a ceiling in the tens of billions of dollars as well, according to the filing.
The company traces its origins to a cryptocurrency mining business, from which it was spun out in 2024, and its rise has been unusually fast even by the standards of AI infrastructure. It now operates or is building toward ten gigawatts of data-center capacity and hundreds of thousands of GPUs, a scale that would have been unthinkable for a two-year-old firm.
Nvidia’s involvement runs through every layer of that growth. The chipmaker invested more than $2 billion ahead of the listing and signed a $1.2 billion capacity lease, giving Nscale a customer for the very GPUs Nvidia sells it. That circularity has made Nscale one of the most closely watched listings of the year.
The filing leaves the final decision on valuation to the market, and the range it is seeking, up to $35 billion, is a statement of ambition as much as a price. Analysts said the offering will test whether public investors are willing to value contracted future revenue the way private backers did at $14.6 billion, and then some.
Nscale chose New York over London for the listing, a decision that added to the pressure on the London Stock Exchange, which has struggled to retain its own homegrown technology firms. The company said little about the choice beyond the filing, but the math was plain: the investors who pay the most for AI infrastructure, and who understand its losses, sit in the United States.
For now, the $103.4 billion figure is the number that will carry Nscale through its roadshow. The market’s job will be to decide how much of it is real, and how much of it depends on a single customer’s appetite for computing power that has not yet been built.
