Nscale announced plans for a fall IPO after securing billions in commitments from Microsoft for GPU cloud infrastructure.
Nscale, the Nvidia-backed London startup that rents GPU capacity to Microsoft, is racing toward a stock listing as soon as this fall with a valuation near $25 billion—nearly double what investors paid in March, when a Series C round valued the company at $14.6 billion. The startup has already hired Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan to lead the offering, with bankers floating a potential listing in New York.
Founded in 2024, Nscale builds and operates data centers packed with Nvidia GPUs, then leases that compute capacity to customers, primarily Microsoft and previously OpenAI. The company's rapid ascent reflects Nvidia's endorsement of Nscale as a flagship example of UK AI infrastructure investment.
The centerpiece of Nscale's investor pitch rests on Microsoft. In September 2025, the Aker-Nscale joint venture signed a $6.2 billion deal to supply AI compute from a data center in Narvik, Norway. A month later Microsoft returned with an expanded agreement covering roughly 200,000 Nvidia GB300 chips across new campuses in Barstow, Texas, and Sines, Portugal, alongside additional capacity in Norway and the UK. CNBC calculated the combined relationship at around $23 billion—positioning it as one of the largest AI infrastructure contracts ever signed.
Not every deal materialized. Nscale and Aker had unveiled Stargate Norway alongside OpenAI in July 2025: a planned 100,000-GPU facility in Narvik designed for OpenAI's workloads. OpenAI never finalized a capacity agreement. By April, Microsoft had stepped into OpenAI's role, renting the site's compute and adding 30,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin chips. The gigafactory was built regardless; the customer simply changed. It's a reminder that signed AI compute deals often prove more fluid than press releases suggest.
Nscale is also expanding its executive leadership ahead of the listing—a signal that public shareholders will scrutinize governance alongside revenue. An S-1 filing must demonstrate how much of the Microsoft pipeline is actually booked, billed, and collected.
The real test lies elsewhere. Nscale isn't the first infrastructure company to sell Wall Street on a contract backlog. CoreWeave went public in March 2025 at $40 per share and climbed to nearly $187 by June as its Microsoft and OpenAI deals appeared secure. It then surrendered more than half those gains as investor concerns mounted over debt levels and customer concentration: two clients accounted for a disproportionate share of revenue. CoreWeave reported $5.1 billion in 2025 revenue yet posted a net loss of $1.2 billion. A contract is a promise, not cash. Public shareholders have already shown they will punish neocloud operators swiftly once those promises look uncertain.
Nscale has not yet filed an S-1 and has not confirmed its listing venue. The exact timing matters less than what the filing must ultimately reveal: how much of Microsoft's commitment has been converted into recognized revenue, and how much remains contingent on future contracts still to be realized.