The company that Britain’s technology press has taken to calling the “British Oracle” is taking its listing to New York. Nscale, a London-based provider of AI cloud computing backed by Nvidia, has filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to list on the New York Stock Exchange, seeking a valuation of as much as $35 billion.
The filing surfaced over the weekend and quickly became the latest data point in a running debate over where European technology companies can command the highest price. For the London Stock Exchange, which has watched a stream of homegrown firms pick New York in recent years, it was another blow.
Nscale was spun out of a cryptocurrency mining operation in 2024 and has since repositioned itself around the market for rented computing power, the infrastructure that AI developers use to train and run their models. Its relationship with Nvidia is unusually deep: the chipmaker is at once its supplier of GPUs, a customer that leases capacity, and an investor.
Nvidia has put more than $2 billion into Nscale and signed a $1.2 billion capacity lease agreement with the company, according to the filing. That triple role gives the startup a built-in buyer and a steady supply of the chips that its business depends on.
The valuation Nscale is seeking represents a sharp jump from its last private funding round, which valued the company at about $14.6 billion. A listing at $35 billion would more than double that figure in the space of months, a pace that analysts said reflects both the shortage of large AI-computing providers available to public investors and Nvidia’s endorsement.
Few companies have managed the transition from crypto mining to mainstream cloud computing. Nscale is trying to do it at scale, and the numbers in its filing show how quickly the business has expanded. First-half revenue reached $140.6 million, more than twelve times the level of a year earlier.
That growth has come at a cost. The company reported a net loss of roughly $1 billion for the first half, and its filing carries language about its ability to continue as a going concern. Analysts said the loss partly reflects the heavy spending required to build out data centers ahead of revenue that arrives over years.
Nscale’s founders have argued that the only way to win in AI infrastructure is to build capacity before demand firms up, betting that customers will commit to long-term contracts. The approach has drawn comparisons to CoreWeave, another Nvidia-linked cloud provider, which also went public with fast growth and large losses.
The choice of New York over London carries weight beyond one company. The London exchange has spent years trying to persuade fast-growing technology businesses that it can match American liquidity and valuations. Each defection to a U.S. venue makes that case harder to sell to the next founder.
Bankers involved in the listing said the decision was driven by depth of investor demand for AI infrastructure in the United States, where analysts and fund managers have grown accustomed to pricing such businesses. British investors, they said, remain more cautious about companies that pair rapid growth with heavy losses.
Nscale’s backers see the filing as a test of whether public markets will pay a premium for Nvidia’s association. The chipmaker’s involvement signals access to the most advanced GPUs, a constraint that has limited many rivals, and its commitment as both customer and investor reduces some of the risk that the startup’s capacity will go unused.
Still, a $35 billion valuation would ask public investors to accept a multiple on revenue that few industrial companies command. Analysts said the success of the offering will hinge on whether fund managers are willing to value contracted future revenue the way private backers have, and on how much weight they give to Nvidia’s name on the share register.
The nickname “British Oracle” captures what Nscale is trying to become: a homegrown answer to the American companies that dominate the market for renting out AI computing. Oracle, which SoftBank and OpenAI have made a central partner in their data-center plans, has seen its own shares rally as investors bet on AI infrastructure, and Nscale is pitching itself as Europe’s version of that trade. Whether British investors want to own that trade at a New York price is a separate question, and early demand is expected to come mainly from American funds.
Nscale has not set a date for its debut, and the final price will be determined by demand during the roadshow. The filing, though, has already delivered an answer to one question hanging over the company: when a British AI firm wants to sell itself to the public, it books a flight to New York.
