Nscale IPO: Europe’s AI Hope Hinges on Two U.S. Giants

Nscale has filed to go public in the US and wants its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under NSCL. The company’s prospectus tells a very sharp story: in roughly two and a half years, it went from renting out bitcoin mining capacity to becoming one of Europe’s most closely watched AI compute providers. It also shows a business that is growing quickly while still leaning hard on contracts, financing and capacity that are not fully in place.

The valuation headline is big even by IPO standards. Nscale is aiming for about $30 billion, according to a CNBC report cited by Reuters. That is well above the $14.6 billion price tag from its latest private round, when it raised $2 billion. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley are leading the deal, but the filing leaves the price range, share count and expected proceeds blank for now. Shortly before the IPO filing, the company also pulled in another $3.1 billion through convertible notes.

The revenue growth is real. In the first half of 2026, Nscale reported $140.6 million in revenue, up from $10.4 million a year earlier. But the losses are still huge, with a net loss of $1,020.1 million for the period. A chunk of that came from fair value adjustments on convertibles and similar instruments, which should fade once it’s public, but the operating picture remains rough. Direct costs of revenue were $189.6 million, above revenue itself, and that excludes $174.0 million in depreciation. In plain English: Nscale is selling compute for less than it costs to deliver.

The order book looks enormous at $103.4 billion, yet most of it sits in the future. Only $2.6 billion is from contracts already running; the rest is signed capacity that has not gone live. The company says Microsoft agreements could bring up to $43.8 billion through 2033, while Anthropic contracts could reach $44.6 billion. Together, that’s roughly $88 billion of the total. But the Anthropic deal also comes with a catch: Nscale says it has no binding commitments for the financing needed to build that capacity, and can only use best efforts to get it.

That dependence runs through the whole filing. Nscale operates about 25,000 GPUs and has committed to 461,000. It has 1.37 gigawatts of active and contracted data center capacity, with most of the larger share still under construction. Five sites are live and twelve more are under contract. It also has about ten gigawatts in a pipeline, much of it tied to the Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia. The company says one customer made up 52 percent of revenue in the first half of 2026, and that its largest customer should fall below 20 percent this year. That’s diversification, technically, but only after a very long warm-up.

The financing needs are just as stark. Nscale had $24.0 billion of outstanding purchase commitments for technology equipment and another $3.5 billion for construction work, much of it due this year and next. Available liquidity was just under $1.5 billion at midyear. Management’s funding forecast initially raised “substantial doubt” about going concern, then the prospectus points to the ability to delay, reduce or cancel capex if money doesn’t show up. Operating cash flow was positive at $1.69 billion in the first half, mostly because customers prepaid $1.6 billion, while $3.29 billion went out into investments.

And the company’s biggest supplier problem is also its biggest strategic problem: Nvidia is not just a supplier, it is one of the backers. Nscale says three suppliers accounted for 53, 37 and 10 percent of purchases of Nvidia GPUs and related infrastructure in the first half. OpenAI withdrew from the Stargate Norway and Stargate UK projects earlier this year, and Microsoft took over the freed capacity in Norway. So yes, this is an IPO story. But it’s also a story about Europe’s AI ambitions being underwritten by a handful of American giants.