Nscale's $3.5B Pre-IPO Funding and AI Compute Deals

Nscale's pre-IPO round is structured as up to $1.5 billion in convertible notes led by Daniel Loeb's Third Point plus roughly $2 billion coming directly from Nvidia, with Goldman Sachs arranging the raise ^[1]. The notes carry a double-digit discount to Nscale's eventual IPO price, but that discount is capped once valuation clears $30 billion - above that ceiling the conversion price locks in place ^[2]. Nvidia has now written checks into Nscale's Series B, its pre-Series C SAFE, its Series C, and this pre-IPO round, making the chip giant simultaneously Nscale's largest supplier and one of its largest financial backers. valueaddvc's own analysis frames the risk bluntly: Nvidia "has a financial interest in Nscale reaching a valuation that lets its own investment convert favorably, which is worth weighing against Nvidia's independence as an outside validator" ^[2].

If Nscale lists on a US exchange as planned - as early as late September 2026, seeking roughly $3 billion in fresh capital on top of the pre-IPO round ^[3]- it becomes the third pure-play "neocloud" to go public after Nebius and CoreWeave. The comparison is not flattering on operating metrics: CoreWeave's contracted backlog of roughly $104 billion sits almost level with Nscale's $103 billion, yet CoreWeave is guiding to $12.4-13.2 billion in FY2026 revenue against Nscale's estimated $400-500 million annualized run-rate, and CoreWeave employs roughly three times as many people to run a similar-sized GPU fleet ^[2]. Nscale also has not disclosed audited financials, margins, or debt detail the way CoreWeave had before its own IPO, and no S-1 had been filed as of early September 2026. Market timing adds another wrinkle: the AI-infrastructure trade wobbled visibly in mid-August 2026, when CoreWeave, Lumentum, and SanDisk all sold off sharply in a single session ^[3].

Nscale's backlog leans heavily on two hyperscale-adjacent relationships, and the history behind them is a cautionary tale about customer durability. The Glomfjord, Norway site was originally built to host OpenAI's "Stargate Norway" project, but OpenAI reportedly withdrew before completion ^[2]. Microsoft's own commitment to Nscale sits at a separate campus: a 5-year, $6.2 billion deal signed in September 2025 to rent roughly 30,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs at Nscale's Narvik, Norway site, developed together with Aker ^[2]. That same churn risk resurfaces in the newer Anthropic relationship: the $45 billion, six-year deal covering about 460 megawatts of Vera Rubin compute at the new West Virginia campus reportedly came together only after Microsoft and Google had already declined similar arrangements with Nscale for that capacity ^[4]. Anthropic has framed the deal as part of a broader compute-buying spree - alongside separate multi-billion-dollar agreements with Fluidstack, Volta Infra Holdings, and SpaceX - driven by demand it says has caused "inevitable strain" on its infrastructure ^[5].

Nscale's founder, Josh Payne, previously ran Arkon Energy, an Australian Bitcoin-mining operation with facilities running on hydroelectric surplus power in Glomfjord, Norway and on stranded energy in Ohio. Arkon raised $110 million at the end of 2023, and Payne went on to incorporate Nscale in London in May 2024 ^[6]. Payne's path to Nscale's first major backer ran through a cold outreach: he messaged Øyvind Eriksen, CEO of Norwegian industrial conglomerate Aker, pitching a partnership to build AI compute hubs on cheap Nordic hydro power; Aker became a lead investor and Eriksen joined Nscale's board ^[2]. The company has moved fast since - a $2 billion Series C in March 2026 valued it at $14.6 billion and added Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, and Susan Decker to the board alongside Eriksen ^[7]- and it is now trying to more than double that valuation ceiling through the pre-IPO convertible notes within roughly six months.

Beyond the hyperscaler-scale cloud deals, Nscale's compute is also being routed into physical AI. Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company, is committing $3.5 billion initially - with intent to scale beyond $6 billion - for access to up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, with deployment starting in the second half of 2027 at a Barstow, Texas site, alongside an Nscale equity stake in Figure ^[8]. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the arrangement as activating "the robotics flywheel: training Figure's models on NVIDIA Vera Rubin through Nscale's AI cloud, validating them in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, and deploying them on NVIDIA GPUs in Figure's robots" ^[8]. Figure founder Brett Adcock tied the deal directly to data volume, noting the company's "Index" data-generation project produces 35 minutes of training data every second that the new compute is meant to absorb for its Helix foundation model ^[8]. The announcement's reach diverged sharply depending on who told it: Adcock's personal post drew roughly 2.2 million views, nearly six times the 379,000 views on Figure's own corporate account covering the same news - while Reddit's response to Nscale's broader IPO story clustered less around the deal itself and more around second-order angles, like what the numbers mean for Nokia's equity stake in Nscale and for an unrelated penny stock, Ionic Digital, tied to the same IPO story. YouTube coverage split along similar lines rather than converging on one storyline: Figure's own channel promoted the GPU partnership directly, while separate videos from a financial-news channel and an independent tech-news channel covered the Anthropic cloud deal and the $14.6 billion valuation and board additions as their own distinct threads.