Nvidia-backed Nscale files for NYSE IPO with $103 billion contract backlog

Nscale, a London-based AI cloud infrastructure company backed by Nvidia, filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange this week, revealing a $103.4 billion contract backlog that dwarfs almost every other AI infrastructure company's disclosed pipeline. The company plans to trade under the ticker NSCL and is targeting a valuation of approximately $30 billion, according to sources cited by Reuters.

The numbers behind the ambition

Nscale's H1 2026 financials reflect the brutal economics of building at scale. Revenue grew 1,252% year over year to $140.6 million — a genuinely staggering growth rate — while the net loss widened nearly threefold to $1.02 billion. The company has deployed 25,000 GPUs but has a further 461,000 active or contracted GPUs to deliver against its existing agreements, suggesting the capital expenditure curve ahead is steep.

The $103.4 billion contract backlog breaks down into two anchor customers. Anthropic has signed four separate services agreements covering $44.6 billion of compute capacity at Nscale's Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia — approximately 460 megawatts. Microsoft commitments account for up to $43.8 billion. The remaining value comes from agreements including one with robotics startup Figure AI, where Nscale took an equity stake in exchange for hosting up to 100,000 GPUs.

A company built in two years

Nscale was founded in June 2023 by Joshua Payne, who at 32 serves as CEO and board chair, and Nathan Townsend. The company's CFO, Alice Takhtajan, spent more than two decades at J.P. Morgan leading technology equity-capital-markets coverage — a credentialing choice that signals the IPO has been the destination all along. The board includes former Meta executive Fidji Simo, former Yahoo president Susan Decker, former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, and Sheryl Sandberg.

Nvidia has invested at least $1 billion through convertible notes, making it both a supplier and a financial stakeholder. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering.

The Anyscale acquisition adds a software layer

Timed to close at or alongside the IPO, Nscale is also acquiring Anyscale — the company behind the Ray distributed computing framework — for approximately $1.65 billion, bringing roughly 200 engineers on board. The acquisition signals that Nscale wants to be more than a GPU landlord: Ray is the framework of choice for many large-scale AI training and inference workloads, and owning it gives Nscale something to sell beyond raw compute.

A caveat buried in the prospectus

The scale of Nscale's contracted backlog is impressive, but the prospectus includes a significant disclosure: "Nscale had not obtained binding commitments for any financing" required to perform on its Anthropic agreements as of the filing date. The West Virginia campus build-out requires capital that has not yet been fully secured. That gap between contracted revenue and available capital is the central risk the company is asking public-market investors to price.

The IPO, if priced near the $30 billion target, would rank among the largest listings in the AI infrastructure wave that has defined 2025 and 2026. As reported by CNBC, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are the joint lead bookrunners.