A raise arranged before the listing
Nscale, the London-based AI cloud provider, is seeking about $3.5bn in pre-IPO financing, Bloomberg reported on 4 September. The package is split between up to $1.5bn of convertible notes led by the hedge fund Third Point and roughly $2bn from Nvidia, with Goldman Sachs arranging the deal.
The notes are priced at a double-digit discount to the eventual IPO price, with the conversion adjustment capped at a $30bn valuation. That cap is the number to hold on to: it sets a ceiling on how much of the listing’s upside the pre-IPO investors give away, and it implies where the company and its bankers expect the offering to land.
Nscale plans to list in New York. A date has not been set.
A backlog that doubled in a month
The raise rests on a contracted revenue backlog of about $103bn, up from roughly $51bn a month earlier. Almost all of that jump comes from one contract: a $45bn, six-year agreement with Anthropic for computing capacity, announced on 26 August.
Microsoft is a customer at Nscale’s Narvik site in Norway, where the company has raised $790m in debt financing from ABN AMRO, DNB, Nordea, SEB and the Norwegian export agency Eksfin. Nscale has ordered roughly 194,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs. Separately, and not part of this financing, the robotics firm Figure committed $3.5bn to Nscale this week for up to 100,000 of those chips.
$33m of revenue against a $103bn book
The gap between the backlog and the business is the striking part. Nscale recorded $33m of revenue in 2025 and more than $100m in its most recent quarter. Figures the company describes as illustrative put annual revenue potential at $18.1bn and adjusted earnings potential at $13.6bn — those are the company’s own projections, not results.
A backlog is a promise to pay for capacity that has not been built yet. Converting it means financing and delivering data centres on a schedule set by customers who have alternatives, which is exactly what the $3.5bn is for. Nvidia’s participation is the familiar pattern of the chipmaker helping fund the buyers of its own hardware.
What to watch
Three things will tell you whether the $30bn cap was optimistic or conservative. Whether the New York listing is filed and priced this month, as Bloomberg’s sources suggest is possible. Whether the backlog keeps growing through further hyperscaler or lab contracts, or whether the Anthropic deal proves to be the peak. And whether quarterly revenue keeps climbing at the rate implied by the jump from $33m for a full year to over $100m in a quarter.
