유럽 GPU 클라우드 운영사 Nscale이 계획된 IPO에 앞서 범유럽 AI 컴퓨팅 용량 확대를 위해 35억 달러를 조달한다.
A British artificial intelligence infrastructure startup founded just two years ago is negotiating a $3.5 billion funding round ahead of its initial public offering. Nscale, which has already secured more than $1.2 billion in private financing, may launch its IPO as early as this month. This development underscores a broader trend: the global competition for computing power has become the central axis of the AI economy.
The ongoing transaction unfolds across two fronts. The first involves the sale of $1.5 billion in convertible notes—a form of debt that can later be converted into equity—targeted at institutional investors. The second consists of an additional $2 billion in funding from Nvidia, which previously participated in Nscale’s Series B round in March of this year.
Nscale’s expansion rate is itself a significant metric. Its Series A round, closed in December 2024, raised $155 million. Just months later, its Series B, led by the Aker investment fund, attracted $1.1 billion. The company designated this as the largest Series B round in European history. With the prospect of an imminent IPO and a pre-market capital raise of $3.5 billion, Nscale positions itself as one of the most heavily capitalized AI infrastructure firms on the continent. Historically, European technology companies rarely achieve such fundraising volumes at an early stage, though the AI sector is actively reshaping this dynamic.
The primary catalyst drawing investor interest is Nscale’s commercial relationship with major industry players. The company recently finalized a contract with Anthropic, developer of the Claude model, valued at approximately $45 billion. According to market information, Nscale has communicated a projected revenue of around $103 billion to potential investors, derived from infrastructure leasing agreements already secured with clients.
It is crucial to contextualize this figure. The $103 billion does not reflect current sales; rather, it is a projection based on long-term contracts with clients leasing computing capacity from Nscale. In other words, it represents contracted revenue, not recognized revenue. Such metrics are standard among infrastructure providers operating on multi-year agreements, including data center operators and cloud platforms. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, for instance, routinely report contractual backlogs that significantly exceed their quarterly earnings. The distinction lies in scale and track record: these established giants possess decades of operational history and billions in proven recurring revenue.
For a two-year-old startup, the divergence between contracted and recognized revenue presents a risk that investors must carefully evaluate. However, Nvidia’s dual role as both investor and potential $2 billion funder serves as a form of technical validation. As previously analyzed regarding Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market, the GPU manufacturer remains highly selective when deploying capital into infrastructure ventures, strategically partnering with firms that expand demand for its processors.
Nscale’s rapid ascent reflects a structural shift in the technology landscape. Computing capacity has emerged as what industry analysts term the “competitive currency” of the artificial intelligence era. Organizations such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta require increasingly vast processing volumes to train and operate their language models. Consequently, a new value chain has formed where infrastructure providers have become as strategic as the model developers themselves. The closest historical parallel is the California gold rush: those who profited most were not the miners, but the suppliers of shovels and pickaxes. In the AI ecosystem, these “shovels” are GPUs, data centers, and cloud capacity.
The $45 billion agreement with Anthropic exemplifies this phenomenon. To compete effectively with OpenAI, Anthropic requires guaranteed long-term access to computing power and is willing to commit to billion-dollar contracts to secure it. Investment in artificial intelligence continues to accelerate, with projections indicating that global spending on AI infrastructure will surpass $300 billion annually in the coming years.
Should the IPO proceed this month, it will serve as one of the first major stress tests of public market appetite for AI infrastructure companies in 2025. Unlike software or large language model developers, Nscale operates at the hardware and computing services layer, a model characterized by different margin structures and substantially higher capital requirements.
The timing is particularly relevant. The technology IPO market is undergoing a gradual recovery following two years of contraction. Firms demonstrating robust contractual pipelines and accelerated growth have identified favorable windows for public listings. Nvidia’s backing and Nscale’s substantial contractual backlog are likely to serve as compelling arguments for public market participants.
For observers tracking the sector, Nscale’s trajectory delivers a clear lesson: in the AI economy, those who control the infrastructure control the game. The remaining question is whether the public market will price this thesis with the same generosity that venture capital investors have demonstrated.
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