Nscale reportedly seeks $3.5B, including $2B from Nvidia, ahead of possible IPO

A two-year-old infrastructure firm eyes the public market

Nscale, a British company that builds computing infrastructure for AI workloads and was founded roughly two years ago, has said it may go public as early as later this month, according to TechCrunch. Ahead of that potential listing, the firm is reportedly in talks to raise an additional $3.5 billion.

Bloomberg reported on Friday that the planned raise has two parts. Nscale is looking to sell $1.5 billion in convertible notes — a type of loan that can convert into company stock later — to a group of investors, while also seeking a further $2 billion in financing from Nvidia. TechCrunch says it contacted both Nscale and Nvidia for comment on the talks.

An existing backer may deepen its commitment

Nvidia is not new to Nscale's shareholder register. The chipmaker participated in the company's Series B round in March, a $1.1 billion raise led by investment fund Aker, which Nscale described as the largest Series B in European history. Before that, Nscale closed a $155 million Series A in December 2024.

If the reported $2 billion arrangement goes ahead, Nvidia would shift from being one investor among several to a direct financier at the moment Nscale prepares for a listing, tightening the link between the dominant supplier of AI chips and one of its infrastructure customers.

A $45 billion contract anchors the story

The fundraising follows a major commercial win. Nscale recently signed a deal with Anthropic worth approximately $45 billion, TechCrunch reports. Earlier in the week, reports attributed to The Information said the company has been telling potential investors it has roughly $103 billion in revenue following that agreement. That figure is not current sales; it is a projection based on signed customer leases.

The gap between committed future revenue and realised sales is the kind of thing public-market investors scrutinise closely, and it will be central to how Nscale is valued if the IPO proceeds.

Why it matters

The reported raise illustrates the scale of capital now required to compete in AI compute, where access to chips and data centre capacity has become one of the industry's most contested resources. A company that did not exist two years ago is discussing billions in pre-IPO financing on the strength of long-dated customer contracts, with Nvidia acting as supplier, shareholder and potential lender all at once.

It also raises questions about how AI infrastructure businesses should be judged. Nscale's $103 billion revenue projection rests on signed leases rather than booked sales, and a public listing would test whether markets reward that backlog at face value.

For Europe, the stakes are regional as well as financial. Nscale, which claims the continent's largest Series B, is one of the few European players operating at this scale in AI infrastructure, and a successful IPO would signal whether the region can build its own compute champions rather than relying on US-owned capacity.