AI cloud and data center firm Nscale raises $3.36bn ahead of its IPO

AI cloud Nscale has raised $3.36 billion in pre-IPO funding as it prepares for its public listing.

The company has pulled in the cash from a group of investors led by hedge fund Third Point. Others to have put money in include GPU maker Nvidia, and funds managed by Apollo, Citadel, Hudson Bay Capital, Abu Dhabi Investment Council, and 8090 Industries.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the company was looking for $3.5 billion ahead of its listing.

Under the deal, Nscale will receive $2.36bn up front, with a further $1bn to follow from Nvidia by mid-November 2026. The notes will automatically convert to ordinary shares when the company IPOs, though Nvidia will receive a non-voting stake.

"This marks a milestone for Nscale as we continue scaling our full-stack AI infrastructure to meet unprecedented global demand," said Josh Payne, founder and CEO of Nscale. "With the backing of these world-class investors, we are strongly positioned to accelerate our data center buildouts globally."

UK-based Nscale published its IPO prospectus last Friday as it gears up for a listing on New York’s Nasdaq market. The company is hoping to raise billions of dollars to fund its build-out of AI data centers, and is said to be targeting a valuation of some $30bn.

The IPO filing shows that Nscale recorded revenue of $140.6 million for the six months to the end of June 2026, which the company claims is up 1,252 percent Year-over-Year. However, losses also ballooned to $1.02bn, compared to $368.9m in the same period of 2025.

Investors who back the company will be doing so based on its growth prospects. Nscale has $103bn in total contracted value, largely thanks to contracts with Anthropic and Microsoft. Its prospectus shows it has five active data centers offering 55MW, with 12 in various stages of development.

Chief among these is the Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia. The company acquired the 2,250-acre site in March 2026, and it could host up to 8GW of capacity, with Phase I planned at 2GW and expected to be online by the first half of 2028. Power will be provided by Caterpillar's fast-response natural gas generator sets – the Caterpillar G3500 series.

Anthropic has agreed a six-year deal to take more than 400MW of space at the data center, while Microsoft signed on for 1.35GW of capacity at the site, for which Nscale is to set up a large-scale GPU deployment based on the Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs.

The prospectus also highlights the size of the challenge facing Nscale if it is to fulfill its lucrative contracts. The company is aiming to operate some 461,000 GPUs, most of which will be Vera Rubin clusters. However, at present only five percent of this amount is energized in its data centers.

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