AI cloud firm Nscale seeking $3.5B in pre-IPO financing from Nvidia and Third Point

Nscale is in talks to raise up to $3.5B ahead of a US listing, including $1.5B of convertible notes led by Third Point and about $2B from Nvidia. It is briefing investors that its contracts total roughly $103B, most of the increase coming from a $45B Anthropic deal that Microsoft and Google both passed on.

Nscale is in talks to raise as much as $3.5B before its stock market debut, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. The London company was founded two years ago and now sits at the centre of Europe’s AI infrastructure build-out.

It is seeking up to $1.5B in convertible notes, with Daniel Loeb’s Third Point set to lead. About $2B more would come from Nvidia, and Goldman Sachs is working on the raise.

Nscale is briefing investors that its contracts total roughly $103B. Four weeks ago that book was reported at $51B.

One deal accounts for most of the difference. Anthropic agreed on 26 August to pay Nscale $45B for computing power, an arrangement that now anchors the flotation.

That capacity was offered elsewhere first. Semafor reported that Microsoft walked away over the summer during a review of its data centre portfolio, and that Google passed after examining its own capital spending.

The company is telling investors it could produce annual revenue of about $18.1B and adjusted earnings of around $13.6B. It calls those figures illustrative rather than formal guidance.

For scale, Nscale booked roughly $33M of revenue across the whole of 2025. Its most recent quarter passed $100M.

The convertibles are priced at a double-digit discount to the IPO. That discount narrows as the valuation rises and stops adjusting at $30B.

The European half of the business runs on European money. The Narvik project in northern Norway drew $790M of committed debt from ABN AMRO, DNB, Nordea, SEB and Eksfin, Norway’s state export finance agency.

That site trades on cold air and Nordic hydropower, and Microsoft is the customer there. Norwegian export credit exists to support projects that use Norwegian power and labour.

Nvidia’s money would sit alongside Nscale’s order book. The company has contracted for about 194,000 Vera Rubin GPUs, so the chipmaker would be helping finance a buyer of its chips.

The board includes Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister. Deliberations are continuing, the size and the investors could still change, and no final decisions have been made.

The listing is planned for New York. Europe’s largest AI infrastructure company, part-funded by a Nordic state lender and written into UK sovereign AI plans, intends to sell its shares in America.