Nscale raises $3.36bn before its IPO, with $1bn from Nvidia

Nscale, the British “neocloud” that builds AI data centres and rents out their computing power, has raised $3.36 billion in convertible loan notes ahead of its planned US listing. Hedge fund Third Point led the round, and Nvidia committed $1 billion of it.

The notes turn into shares automatically when the IPO completes. Nvidia’s convert into non-voting shares and its money is due in mid-November; the other $2.36 billion arrives at closing.

Cash now, shares later

A convertible note is a loan that turns into equity later. Nscale has not disclosed the conversion terms. What it gets is cash before the market has priced it. The company filed its IPO paperwork the week before and is expected to be valued at $35 billion on the New York Stock Exchange, seeking to raise $3 billion, TechCrunch reports. It has applied to list under the ticker “NSCL”.

Nscale says the money will speed up its build-out “from behind-the-meter power plants to liquid cooled AI data centers and large-scale GPU clusters”. It was spun out of the Australian crypto miner Arkon Energy two years ago and is building large campuses in Norway and West Virginia.

Two customers, most of the book

Nscale says it has more than $103 billion in total contracted value. Its filing shows how concentrated that is. According to Quartz, Microsoft and Anthropic account for $87.7 billion: agreements with Microsoft worth about $43.8 billion through 2033, and a $44.6 billion deal signed with Anthropic in August for computing power at an eight-gigawatt site in West Virginia.

Only $2.6 billion of the $103 billion was active at the end of August. In the first six months of 2026, Nscale posted a $1.02 billion net loss on $140.6 million of revenue. And the filing said Nscale had not yet secured financing for the Anthropic deal.

That last point is the one to hold on to. The likelier reading is that this round is part of closing that gap, though Nscale has not tied the money to any single project.

Anthropic’s hunger for computing is the thread that runs through the week. On September 24 it signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion agreement with Akamai for cloud capacity to handle its CPU workloads, with a warrant for up to about 5% of Akamai’s stock. The West Virginia contract with Nscale is almost four times that size, and it rests on a supplier that is still raising the money to build it.

Nvidia on both sides

Nvidia’s $1 billion deserves a second look. The chipmaker sells the processors that fill data centres like Nscale’s. Here it also becomes a lender that will turn into a shareholder, through non-voting stock that gives it exposure to Nscale’s growth without a say in how the company is run.

The rest of the list leans towards hedge funds and big investors, including Apollo-managed funds, Citadel, Hudson Bay Capital and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council. Goldman Sachs acted as placement agent.

What to watch

The IPO price, when it comes, will be the market’s verdict on a company with a huge order book, a small revenue base and two customers who matter far more than the rest. Watch whether Nscale says how much of the West Virginia build is now funded, whether its customer list widens beyond two names, and whether Nvidia’s money lands in November as planned.