Nscale raises $3.36B in pre-IPO financing to accelerate full-stack AI cloud expansion

Nscale just pulled in $3.36 billion through convertible loan notes, with Third Point leading the round. NVIDIA is on the hook for another $1 billion in mid-November, while $2.36 billion was funded at closing. The London-based AI cloud company is heading toward a US listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL, and Goldman Sachs is doing double duty as placement agent for the notes and lead bookrunner for the IPO, alongside J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley.

The financing reads like a vote of confidence, but also like a very expensive bridge. The notes convert into shares only if the IPO happens, and Nscale has not said what price those shares will convert at. It also hasn’t disclosed the interest rate or maturity. Hedgeweek previously reported the notes were being marketed at a double-digit discount to the IPO price, though Nscale hasn’t confirmed that.

What makes Nscale unusual is the scale of the paper business already built around it. The company says total contracted value reached $103.4 billion as of August 31, up from $38 billion at the end of 2025, with about $2.6 billion active today. Revenue in the first half of 2026 was $140.6 million, while net loss came to $1.02 billion. Most of the contracted value comes from two customers: a $43.8 billion Microsoft deal running through 2033 and an Anthropic agreement worth up to about $44.6 billion at Nscale’s Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia.

That contrast is the whole story here. Nscale was founded in 2024 as a spin-out of crypto-mining company Arkon Energy, and it sells the full stack: land, behind-the-meter power, GPUs and data centers. As of August 31, it had about 25,000 active GPUs and 461,000 active or contracted GPUs across five active and 12 contracted sites. It has also moved fast on hiring, growing from 40 people to more than 1,000. The company says the new cash will help it keep building data centers globally, and it has already piled up more than $9 billion in financings since 2024.

The bigger question is whether this is a real industrial buildout or just the most expensive race for compute ever staged. The filing leaves the IPO price range blank, and the Anthropic deal can be canceled if Nscale misses what the company calls stringent milestones. That’s not exactly the same thing as demand being solved.