MarketsNVDA +0.84%SEP 05, 2026

Nscale seeks $3.5B pre-IPO, with $2B from Nvidia, at $30B cap

London-based Nscale is briefing investors on $103B in contracts, anchored by a $45B Anthropic deal, as Third Point leads a $1.5B convertible note tranche.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Nscale, the London-based AI cloud provider founded in 2024, is in talks to raise as much as $3.5 billion in pre-IPO financing, with roughly $2 billion coming from Nvidia and up to $1.5 billion in convertible notes led by Daniel Loeb’s Third Point, according to Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs is running the raise. The convertibles are priced at a double-digit discount to the planned IPO, with that discount narrowing to zero at a $30 billion valuation cap, per a source cited by Reuters.

The financing is the corporate scaffolding around a much stranger number. Nscale is briefing investors on a signed contract book of roughly $103 billion, up from about $51 billion four weeks earlier, per The Next Web. In 2025, the company booked about $33 million in revenue.

The anchor of the book is a six-year, $45 billion compute agreement with Anthropic out of a West Virginia campus. Semafor, cited by The Next Web, reported that Microsoft and Google both passed on that Anthropic capacity before Nscale took it. Microsoft is separately the anchor tenant at Nscale’s Narvik, Norway campus.

Nscale told investors the buildout could throw off roughly $18.1 billion in annual revenue and $13.6 billion in adjusted EBITDA, labeled illustrative rather than guidance. It has contracted around 194,000 of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPUs to get there.

The neocloud cost floor set by Crusoe’s $3B round at $30B now has a European mirror image, and the same anchor investor sits on both cap tables. Nvidia’s $96.2B print and 106% surge supplied the revenue; this supplies the placement.

The historical analogue is the fiber overbuild of 1999-2001, when Global Crossing and Level 3 raised at revenue multiples justified only by forward capacity contracts. The contracts were real. The pricing that followed wasn’t what the underwriters modeled. Compute buyers over the next 12 to 24 months are likely to inherit that arithmetic.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.