Nscale, a two-year-old British AI infrastructure company, is raising $3.5 billion ahead of a potential public listing as early as this month, according to people familiar with the matter.
The capital structure splits into $1.5 billion in convertible notes from a group of investors and $2 billion in direct financing from Nvidia, which participated in the company's Series B round in March. That round, led by Aker, closed at $1.1 billion. A Series A in December 2024 raised $155 million.
The fundraising strategy hinges on a single anchor tenant: Anthropic signed a $45 billion compute contract with Nscale earlier this year. The company has since told investors it has $103 billion in projected revenue from signed customer leases—future cash flows, not current sales.
Nscale is targeting a $30 billion valuation for the public listing, which would require investors to value the company at roughly 3.5 times annual bookings. That multiple is aggressive for an infrastructure provider, even one with Anthropic locked in, and assumes the company can execute expansion deals at similar scale.
The economics turn on a familiar AI bet: sustained demand for specialized compute capacity and wide margins on leasing it. Nscale's competitive moat depends on securing long-term customer commitments before rivals fill capacity, then building out infrastructure faster and cheaper than cloud giants can repurpose existing data centers.
The company operates from London. No IPO date has been officially announced.
