Breaking

Nscale raises $3.36 billion in convertible notes ahead of U.S. IPO

The British AI cloud company, which reports $103 billion in contracted value, largely from Anthropic and Microsoft, has five active data centers and 12 more in development, including an 8-gigawatt West Virginia campus.

Motion Media News Staff

Sep 25, 2026

2 minutes

Close-up of network and power cables running along the back of a data center server rack.

Server racks in a data center (file photo; not an Nscale site). Photo: Derrick Coetzee from Berkeley, CA, USA, CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en), via Wikimedia Commons (source)

Nscale, the British AI cloud and data center company, said Friday, Sept. 25, that it has raised $3.36 billion in convertible notes as it prepares for a U.S. initial public offering.

Hedge fund Third Point led the round, DatacenterDynamics reported, with participation from Nvidia and funds managed by Apollo, Citadel, Hudson Bay Capital, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and 8090 Industries. Nscale receives $2.36 billion up front, and Nvidia, an existing investor, will provide the remaining $1 billion by mid-November. The notes convert to ordinary shares when the company lists; Nvidia will receive a non-voting stake.

"With the backing of these world-class investors, we are strongly positioned to accelerate our data center buildouts globally," founder and CEO Josh Payne said.

The IPO

Nscale filed its IPO prospectus the previous week. Reports differ on the details: DatacenterDynamics said the company is preparing to list on Nasdaq at a valuation of about $30 billion, while TechCrunch cited a Financial Times report of an expected $35 billion valuation on the NYSE and a Bloomberg report that it aims to raise $3 billion.

According to the filing, as reported by DatacenterDynamics, Nscale had revenue of $140.6 million in the six months through June 2026, which the company says is up 1,252% from a year earlier. Its net loss for the period widened to $1.02 billion from $368.9 million.

Contracts and capacity

Nscale reports $103 billion in total contracted value, largely from deals with Anthropic and Microsoft. It has five active data centers offering 55 megawatts, with 12 more in development, DatacenterDynamics said.

The largest is the Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia, a 2,250-acre site bought in March 2026 that could eventually host up to 8 gigawatts. A 2-gigawatt first phase, powered by Caterpillar natural gas generator sets, is expected online in the first half of 2028. Anthropic has agreed to a six-year deal for more than 400 megawatts at the campus, and Microsoft has signed for 1.35 gigawatts, using Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems.

The company aims to operate about 461,000 GPUs, mostly Vera Rubin clusters, but only about 5% of that total is currently energized, according to the prospectus as reported by DatacenterDynamics. Nscale was spun out of Australian crypto miner Arkon Energy two years ago, TechCrunch reported.