- London-based AI infrastructure company Nscale is preparing for a US IPO as early as September after securing around $51 billion in total contracted revenue.
- Quarterly revenue has surged from around $37 million in Q1 2026 to more than $100 million in Q2, while the company is expanding towards 10GW of AI data centre capacity and nearly 289,000 contracted GPUs.
- The IPO preparations follow a series of major milestones, including a $2 billion funding round and the $1.65 billion acquisition of Anyscale.
London-based AI infrastructure company Nscale is reportedly preparing for a US initial public offering as early as September after telling prospective investors it has secured around $51 billion in total contracted revenue, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter.
Company executives told potential backers that revenue grew to more than $100 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared to around $37 million in the first quarter and roughly $33 million for all of 2025. Do the annualising yourself and Nscale’s actual run-rate lands somewhere around $400 million to $500 million. The gap makes sense once you know how infrastructure deals work: a single multi-year compute contract gets counted as billions in future revenue the moment it’s signed, long before a single GPU is switched on.
Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are reportedly advising on the potential IPO, although discussions remain ongoing and the listing could still be delayed.
From a cold LinkedIn message to a $51 billion contract book
Nscale was founded in 2024 by Josh Payne, an Australian entrepreneur whose earlier career spanned coal mining, a construction recruitment platform, and cryptocurrency mining, before he moved into AI infrastructure.
The company emerged from Arkon Energy, a Melbourne-based crypto miner, following a $155 million Series A round in December 2024. Payne has said the partnership that helped propel that growth, with Norwegian industrial group Aker on the Narvik campus, started with a single cold LinkedIn message to Aker’s chief executive, Øyvind Eriksen, who later joined Nscale’s board.
Since then, Nscale’s fundraising has moved at a pace few European infrastructure companies have matched: a $1.1 billion Series B in September 2025, a $433 million pre-Series C SAFE round days later, a $1.4 billion GPU-backed loan in February, a $790 million debt facility for the Narvik campus in May, and a $2 billion Series C in March that valued the company at $14.6 billion.
In July it added a $900 million revolving credit facility from a bank syndicate led by J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. And in late July it agreed to acquire distributed AI software company Anyscale for approximately $1.65 billion, a deal expected to close in the second half of 2026.
Anyscale brings roughly 200 employees, a customer roster that includes Coinbase, Runway, and Bedrock Robotics, and, according to its co-founders, 70% sequential revenue growth in its most recent quarter.
The Series C round also brought the board Nscale needed for a listing: Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta chief operating officer; Susan Decker, the former Yahoo president who now runs university platform Raftr; and Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister and Meta global affairs chief now at Hiro Capital. Microsoft veteran Nidhi Chappell joined as president of AI infrastructure, and JPMorgan’s Alice Takhtajan as chief financial officer.
Why customer concentration matters more
Nscale is expanding its chip inventory, with roughly 25,000 active chips and about 289,000 active and contracted chips as of the second quarter of 2026, including roughly 194,000 contracted Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, alongside Blackwell processors already deployed.
The UK startup isn’t alone in chasing public markets, or public-style capital, off the back of AI infrastructure demand. CoreWeave has gone public and locked in multibillion-dollar contracts with OpenAI and Nvidia. Crusoe was reportedly in talks to triple its valuation to around $30 billion on the back of its Stargate work. Together AI raised $800 million in April at an $8.3 billion valuation. Nscale’s argument for why it deserves a premium over all of them is vertical integration: it owns the power, the data centres, the GPUs, and now, with Anyscale, the software layer that sits on top.
Whether that earns a premium multiple, or whether public investors just see more debt and more capital intensity than the pure-play cloud providers, is the question the IPO will actually settle.
