The pushback
Some investors in Nscale’s planned New York listing are pressing for a valuation of $16bn to $19bn, well below the roughly $30bn the company is seeking, Bloomberg reported on 18 October. The talks are continuing and no decision has been made. One reason cited was the collapse of the IPO plans of Firmus, an Australian data centre company.
Nscale filed its Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 18 September, intending to list ordinary shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NSCL. It is still working through SEC comments and has not begun formal marketing, although the 15-day waiting period has passed.
The company is registered in England and Wales and run from London. It is a late entrant that scaled quickly: the filing says it went from $100m in total contracted value to over $103bn in two and a half years, from a 750MW power pipeline to more than 10GW, and from 40 staff to over 1,000 across 14 regions.
The number the argument is about
The $103bn is the headline, and the filing is precise about what sits inside it. Nscale’s take-or-pay contracts total “$2.6 billion of active and $103.4 billion of active and contracted TCV as of August 31, 2026,” with a weighted average contract life of approximately 5.7 years. Active contracted value is therefore about 2.5% of the figure the valuation leans on; the rest is signed but not yet running.
Realised revenue is smaller still. Nscale generated $140.6m in the six months to 30 June 2026, a 1,252% increase on the $10.4m a year earlier, after $33.0m for the whole of 2025 and $19.1m in 2024. That growth rate is real and it is also narrow: the filing discloses that the largest customer accounted for 52% of revenue in the first half of 2026 and 73% of revenue in 2025, and that in 2024 a single customer accounted for substantially all of it.
Two contracts and a financing gap
Most of the book sits in two relationships. Between September 2025 and April 2026 Nscale signed statements of work with Microsoft providing for payments of up to approximately $43.8bn through December 2033. On 25 August 2026 it entered the Anthropic Services Agreements, four separate contracts providing for aggregate payments of up to approximately $44.6bn.
The Anthropic deal carries a condition the filing does not soften. Nscale must use best efforts to obtain qualifying financing for the GPU equipment and data centre infrastructure at the Monarch Compute Campus, and, in the company’s own words, “as of the date of this prospectus, we have not obtained binding commitments for any of the financings required to fund performance under the Anthropic Services Agreements, and all such financings remain in process.”
Why Microsoft matters twice
Microsoft is both the anchor customer and the most recent setback. The S-1 records that OpenAI withdrew from the Stargate Norway and Stargate UK partnerships in April 2026, after which Microsoft expanded its agreement with Nscale to take the extra capacity at Stargate Norway. Nscale also acquired a 200MW site in Portugal in April to support deploying over 66,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs for Microsoft from late 2027.
This month, Microsoft said it was withdrawing from a Nscale data centre agreement, citing power-related delays — the deal reported as covering roughly 23,000 Nvidia chips at a UK site. For an investor reading the concentration disclosure, that is the specific risk the filing describes, happening in public, three weeks before the roadshow.
What to watch
Nscale competes with CoreWeave, Nebius, Crusoe and Lambda, and the comparison investors will make is to how those shares have traded rather than to the contracted-value table. The price is the live question: $30bn values the book, $16bn to $19bn values the revenue. Whether the Anthropic financings close before the shares are marketed is the detail most likely to settle which of those two numbers wins.
