Nscale eyes US IPO after revealing $51B AI contract backlog

Nscale wants to go public on a US exchange as soon as September, and the number it's leading with is eye-popping: $51 billion in total contracted revenue. Quarterly sales, meanwhile, hit just over $100 million in Q2 2026, up from $37 million the quarter before and roughly $33 million for the entirety of 2025. Annualize that and you get a run-rate somewhere between $400 million and $500 million — a fraction of the headline figure. The gap isn't fraud, it's accounting for infrastructure deals: sign a multi-year compute contract and the whole thing gets booked as future revenue immediately, whether or not a single chip has spun up yet.

The company's rise has been fast even by AI-boom standards. Josh Payne, an Australian who bounced through coal mining, construction-recruitment software, and crypto mining before landing on AI infrastructure, spun Nscale out of his Melbourne crypto miner Arkon Energy in late 2024. A cold LinkedIn message to Aker CEO Øyvind Eriksen turned into a partnership on the Narvik data center campus in Norway, and Eriksen eventually joined the board. Since then the fundraising has barely paused: a $1.1 billion Series B, a $433 million SAFE round days later, a $1.4 billion GPU-backed loan, a $790 million Narvik debt facility, a $2 billion Series C that pegged the company at $14.6 billion, and a $900 million revolving credit line from Goldman and JPMorgan.

The Series C also bought Nscale a board that looks built for a listing: Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker, Nick Clegg, plus a Microsoft veteran running AI infrastructure and a JPMorgan alum as CFO. Then in late July came the $1.65 billion purchase of Anyscale, the distributed AI software outfit with Coinbase and Runway as customers and, its founders say, 70% sequential revenue growth last quarter. That deal, expected to close in the second half of 2026, gives Nscale a software layer to stack on top of its physical infrastructure.

And the physical infrastructure is the real bet. Nscale is chasing 10GW of data center capacity and counts roughly 289,000 active and contracted GPUs, including about 194,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin chips on order alongside Blackwell units already running. It's not alone chasing this money — CoreWeave already went public, Crusoe has reportedly been in talks to triple its valuation to $30 billion on Stargate work, Together AI raised $800 million in April at $8.3 billion. Nscale's pitch is vertical integration: power, buildings, chips, and now software, all under one roof. Whether public markets reward that with a premium, or just see a heavily indebted, capital-hungry operation compared to leaner cloud rivals, is exactly what this IPO is going to test.