Nscale Pushes $30B IPO as Investors Counter at $16B-$19B

Nscale reported $140.6 million in revenue for the first half of 2026 against a $1.02 billion net loss. It is still asking US investors to value it at roughly $30 billion.

Some are not biting. Bloomberg reported that investors have pushed back toward a $16 billion to $19 billion band. The gap matters because one giant contract sits under the pitch: a six-year, $44.6 billion compute agreement with Anthropic, part of a $103 billion backlog in which Microsoft and Anthropic together account for roughly 85%. Only $2.6 billion of that $103 billion was active as of 31 August.

The CEO behind the pitch is Josh Payne, a former Australian coal miner who moved to London and started Nscale in 2024. Payne spent three years in a coal mine before building a bitcoin-mining business, Arkon Energy, and then pivoting to AI infrastructure. By a staff memo he circulated, the company still intends a year-end 2026 New York listing at $30 billion to $35 billion.

Then Microsoft walked. The software firm pulled out of a deal to be 'the main tenant at Nscale's planned data centre in Loughton, Essex' after UK grid operators told Nscale the site would not be powered until the 2030s. Under the scrapped arrangement, Microsoft was to lease 23,000 Nvidia AI chips there. Construction at Nscale's flagship Norway site is reportedly running six months behind schedule.

Capacity is the number that reframes everything else. Nscale had delivered 55 megawatts of computing capacity as of August 2026 against signed-contract demand corresponding to roughly 10 gigawatts, and its largest single customer accounted for 52% of first-half revenue. This is where the valuation gap lives: between a backlog that totals $103 billion and a plant with 55 megawatts live. We've logged 441 AI infrastructure stories in the last 90 days; few show a gap this wide between paper demand and installed capacity.