Nscale appoints former OpenAI exec Fidji Simo to board ahead of anticipated IPO

Nscale, the U.K.-based startup that designs, builds and operates data centers for AI workloads, has appointed former OpenAI, Instacart and Meta executive Fidji Simo to its board of directors as it gears up for an anticipated public listing this autumn.

According to TechCrunch, Simo joins an already well-known board that includes Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker and Nick Clegg. The timing matters: the company is expected to go public in the coming months, and the appointment adds a director with first-hand experience taking a company through a listing.

Who Fidji Simo is

Simo was most recently CEO of AGI deployment at OpenAI, a position TechCrunch describes as effectively the number-two role at the AI lab. She departed in July, citing health reasons, and continues to advise OpenAI on a part-time basis.

Her earlier career maps closely onto what a pre-IPO infrastructure company would look for. As chair and CEO of Instacart, she led the grocery-delivery firm through its 2023 stock-market debut. Before that, she spent more than a decade at Meta, including a stint running the Facebook app, and she currently holds a board seat at Shopify.

A board assembled for a listing

Nscale founder and CEO Josh Payne said in a statement that Simo belongs to a small group of leaders who grasp both what it takes to run products at billion-user scale and the strain that scale places on the infrastructure underneath.

"That's what we're building for at Nscale," Payne said, adding that the board has been put together deliberately. It combines, in his words, "the independence, financial rigor and operating depth to which companies at this scale are held."

A fast rise built on AI demand

Nscale is only about two years old, and TechCrunch reports that its valuation has climbed steeply since founding, driven by surging demand for AI infrastructure.

The company is also reportedly working on a large private raise before going public. Bloomberg reported last week, citing unnamed sources, that Nscale is seeking up to $3.5 billion ahead of the planned IPO. Those figures have not been confirmed by the company itself.

Why it matters

A board appointment rarely makes headlines on its own, but this one functions as a signal. Nscale is a very young company whose value has risen almost entirely on the strength of AI infrastructure demand, and public-market investors tend to scrutinize governance closely when a firm that young seeks a listing. Assembling directors with the résumés of Sandberg, Clegg and now Simo — spanning platform-scale operations, public-company leadership and a recent IPO — is a conventional way for a startup to shore up credibility before facing that scrutiny.

Simo's specific background also lines up with Nscale's pitch. Her role at OpenAI placed her close to the workloads and customers driving AI data center demand, while her Instacart tenure gave her direct experience of the shift from private hypergrowth to public-company accountability.

The move also illustrates how quickly the AI infrastructure layer has matured: a company founded roughly two years ago is now preparing for an IPO and staffing its board accordingly. If the listing proceeds as anticipated this autumn, Nscale will give investors one of the more direct available bets on the build-out of AI compute — and it will arrive with a board assembled to reassure them.