Nscale seeks $30 billion IPO as investors push back to $16B-$19B

Nscale's pitch rests heavily on a single six-year, $44.6 billion compute agreement with Anthropic, which sits inside a $103 billion backlog where Microsoft and Anthropic together account for roughly 85%. That concentration was underscored by the company's own numbers: its largest single customer accounted for 52% of first-half revenue.

The gap between paper demand and installed capacity is the other thread running through the story. Only $2.6 billion of the $103 billion backlog was active as of 31 August, and Nscale had delivered 55 megawatts of computing capacity as of August 2026 against signed-contract demand corresponding to roughly 10 gigawatts. That shortfall sits alongside Microsoft pulling out of a deal to be the main tenant at Nscale's planned Loughton, Essex data centre, after UK grid operators told Nscale the site would not be powered until the 2030s; under the scrapped arrangement, Microsoft was to lease 23,000 Nvidia AI chips there. Construction at Nscale's flagship Norway site is reportedly running six months behind schedule.