Nscale seeks up to $3.5B in pre-IPO financing as AI infrastructure race intensifies
Tech Funding News Abhinaya Prabhu ● Covered by 4 sources
Nscale is trying to raise up to $3.5B before its IPO. Nvidia may put in $2B, which makes the deal look a lot more circular than usual.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Abhinaya Prabhu — read the original for the full story.
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Nscale is in talks to raise as much as $3.5 billion ahead of a planned US listing, with the money split between $1.5 billion in convertible notes and about $2 billion from Nvidia. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the talks, said Third Point is expected to lead the note round and Goldman Sachs is advising on the fundraising.
The pitch is happening against a backdrop of absurdly fast growth on paper. Nscale now says its contracts are worth about $103 billion, nearly double the roughly $51 billion it was citing a month earlier when it first pointed to a possible September listing. A big chunk of that jump comes from a six-year, $45 billion compute deal with Anthropic for capacity at Nscale’s West Virginia campus, after Microsoft and Google reportedly passed.
Nscale has told investors that the backlog could one day translate into roughly $18.1 billion in annual revenue and $13.6 billion in adjusted EBITDA, but it says those are illustrative figures rather than formal guidance. The gap is still enormous: actual revenue was around $33 million for all of 2025, then climbed past $100 million in the second quarter of 2026. That’s the reality behind the headline backlog, and it’s the kind of spread that will make pricing this deal tricky.
The company has been on a hard charging streak. It closed a $2 billion Series C in March at a $14.6 billion valuation, then pulled in roughly $3 billion in investment-grade debt at the end of August to fund GPU campuses in Ward County, Texas, and Madison County, North Carolina. It also agreed to supply Figure with at least $3.5 billion of AI cloud compute while taking an undisclosed equity stake in the robotics startup.
Nvidia’s possible $2 billion investment adds a particularly tidy knot to the whole thing. Nscale has contracted for around 194,000 of Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin GPUs, most of its active chips run on Nvidia’s Blackwell series, and Nvidia was already an investor in Figure before Nscale took its own stake there. The company is trying to look like a full-stack AI hyperscaler, not just a GPU landlord, but this is still a business where the chipmaker, the cloud provider, and the customer keep showing up in each other’s pockets.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the AI boom’s favourite trick: make the supply chain fund itself and call it strategy. I’m a fan of open models and boring balance sheets, so a deal this circular sets off every alarm bell at once. If the backlog is real, the market will reward it; if not, this is just financial cosplay with nicer GPUs.
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