Nscale IPO to test investor appetite for an AI cloud built on two anchor customers

British neocloud Nscale is preparing to go public on the NYSE, and its filing makes the central question for investors hard to miss: what is the company worth when almost all of its contracted revenue depends on two customers?

According to TechCrunch, Nscale has amassed more than $103 billion in contracts since being spun out of Australian cryptocurrency miner Arkon Energy two years ago. Roughly 85% of that total comes from two agreements: a deal to supply Microsoft with $43.8 billion worth of compute through 2033, and a supply agreement with Anthropic worth $44.6 billion.

A deal Anthropic can leave

The Anthropic contract is not unconditional. TechCrunch reports that the agreement is contingent on Nscale obtaining financing, and that Anthropic retains the right to walk away from or cancel the deal if Nscale misses milestones the filing itself characterizes as stringent. In effect, the second-largest contract on the books is partly an option that depends on Nscale's execution and fundraising rather than a firm commitment.

What the numbers show

Figures cited by TechCrunch put Nscale's revenue at $140.6 million for the six months ended June 30, a steep rise from $10.4 million in the same period a year earlier. Net losses widened to $1.02 billion from $369 million — a familiar pattern among AI infrastructure operators that spend heavily on data centers before the contracted revenue from those facilities arrives.

The company has been raising capital aggressively ahead of the listing. Earlier this month, Nvidia, one of Nscale's major investors, agreed to provide $1 billion in convertible debt as part of a larger $3.1 billion financing deal, according to TechCrunch. Nscale was valued at $14.6 billion in its most recent round, a $2 billion Series C led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries, so the reported IPO valuation of $35 billion — per the Financial Times — would mark a substantial step up. Bloomberg reports the company is seeking to raise $3 billion in the offering.

Not an isolated case

Nscale's concentration problem is the industry's pattern, not an outlier. A paper by credit hedge fund Sona Asset Management, featured in the Financial Times, found that many AI infrastructure providers rely heavily on a small number of customers. TechCrunch points to CoreWeave, which generates 67% of its revenue from Microsoft, and to data center builder Applied Digital, which derives 67% of its revenue from Oracle and 30% from CoreWeave.

Sona argued that this interconnectedness is not necessarily bad in itself, but noted that a single setback or strategic shift by a major player can easily affect the entire industry.

Nscale operates data centers in Norway, Portugal, Texas and West Virginia. Its board includes former Meta executives Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg, along with former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo. Its competitors include CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda and Crusoe — the latter of which raised $3.9 billion last week at a $30.9 billion valuation.

Why it matters

CoreWeave's own listing already showed that public markets will fund GPU cloud operators at scale. Nscale's IPO will test something narrower: whether investors will back a neocloud whose contract book is this concentrated, and where one of the two anchor deals can be cancelled if financing or milestones slip. Because Sona's analysis suggests the same few buyers sit behind much of the sector's revenue, Nscale is also a bellwether for correlated risk across listed AI infrastructure names. How investors price that exposure, in this offering and the ones that follow, will help determine how much capital keeps flowing into AI compute buildouts.