$103.4B in Multi-Year
Contracts.
$33M in Revenue in 2025.

On September 18, 2026, Nscale, a British company, filed a prospectus on Form S-1 with the SEC for a listing in the United States. It builds data centers filled with the GPUs used for AI computing and rents out that computing capacity under long-term contracts. As of August 31, 2026, the total value of its contracts with customers was $103.4 billion. The counterparties include Microsoft and Anthropic. NVIDIA is also a customer.

The same document has another number. Revenue for the full year 2025 was $33.0 million. It grew to $140.6 million in the six months ended June 30, 2026, but the net loss for the same six months was $1.02 billion. Of the total contract value, the part tied to capacity that is already running is $2.6 billion. The rest is contracted and still to be delivered.

One of the largest contracts was signed 24 days before the filing. Under the agreements with Anthropic dated August 25, the amount Nscale would receive is up to approximately $44.6 billion. Yet the risk factors say that, as of the date of the prospectus, the company has not obtained binding commitments for any of the financings required to perform these agreements. If Nscale fails to deliver within a specified period after the expected delivery date, Anthropic can terminate that part of the agreements.

The names around it are large. NVIDIA makes the GPUs, and it is also a shareholder, a customer and a guarantor of lease payments. The board includes Nick Clegg, a former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Sheryl Sandberg, a former chief operating officer of Facebook. The founder is 32. Two years ago, the majority of revenue came from crypto-currency miners. The company describes itself as building the “foundation” of the age of AI. Most of the computing capacity it has contracted has not yet begun to be delivered.

Ten questions. We lay out only what the S-1 says.

Question 1

What is this company, really?

In one line: a company that rents out the GPUs used for AI computing, together with the building and the power.

What Nscale rents out is computing capacity. It provides the data center, fills it with large numbers of NVIDIA GPUs, ties them together with software, and makes them available for customers to use for AI training and inference. Customers do not buy the machines. They rent a set amount of computing capacity for a set period.

The company calls itself a “full-stack AI hyperscaler”. It means that one company holds the land and power, the data centers, the GPUs and the software that runs them. The founder’s letter states the aim this way.

“

Whoever builds the foundation upon which the AI market sits will build a generation-defining company.

NSCALE S-1 (SEP 2026) — LETTER FROM OUR FOUNDER

Scale is measured by three numbers: the number of GPUs, the amount of power (MW), and total contract value. As of August 31, 2026, approximately 25,000 GPUs were active. Including those contracted and still to be delivered, the number is 461,000. Power, active and contracted together, is approximately 1.37 GW (counted as the power available to the computing equipment).

It is incorporated in England and Wales and headquartered in London. It is a British company, but it filed on the form used by U.S. companies (S-1), not on the form for foreign companies (F-1). It intends to apply to list on the New York Stock Exchange.

Well-known names among the customers and on the board

This prospectus has many names in it. The founder’s letter says the company serves “some of the largest companies on Earth”. The names appear in the summary.

Four counterparties are described with an amount or a scale:

• Microsoft — statements of work that provide for payments to Nscale of up to approximately $43.8 billion through December 2033
• Anthropic — agreements that provide for payments to Nscale of up to approximately $44.6 billion, entered into on August 25, 2026
• NVIDIA — a computing services agreement for an aggregate amount of $1.2 billion
• Figure — a humanoid robotics company. An agreement with the potential to deploy up to 100,000 GPUs

NVIDIA is more than a counterparty. It is the primary manufacturer of the GPUs in Nscale’s facilities, and a shareholder that came to hold approximately $1.18 billion of shares across two financings. It guarantees Nscale’s payments under the lease of a site in Texas for the first five years, up to $860 million, and it has signed an agreement to put in a further $1.0 billion.

The list of directors also catches the eye. Nick Clegg, a former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Sheryl Sandberg, a former chief operating officer of Facebook. Susan Decker, who serves on the board of Berkshire Hathaway. Fidji Simo, who was an executive at OpenAI. All four joined in 2026.

But the large amounts come with conditions. The Microsoft and Anthropic amounts are “up to” figures, and the NVIDIA guarantee has a price. This article reads those conditions, the ones behind the names, in order from Question 4.

Two years ago, it rented space to crypto-currency miners

In May 2024, Nscale was spun out from a company called Arkon Energy and launched under its current name. The timeline in the prospectus puts the beginning of the idea at August 2023. Arkon Energy is described, in the founder’s biography, as a company that buys, builds and operates data centers “that help power the Bitcoin network”.

The trace is still in the revenue. The majority of the $19.1 million of revenue in 2024 was derived from providing data center infrastructure to institutional crypto-currency miners. The prospectus says the company ceased providing these services at the end of 2024. 2025 was its first full year providing computing services for AI.

According to the founder’s letter, total contracted value went from $100 million to over $103 billion in two and a half years, and the team from 40 to over 1,000.

What it rents out is GPU computing capacity. The names are large. Two years ago, the majority of revenue came from crypto-currency miners.

Question 2

What does it compete on?

It competes on cheap power and on owning everything itself. But the capacity active today is primarily in colocation and leased facilities.

The prospectus lists many strengths, but the core comes down to three: securing land with cheap power early, owning everything from the land to the GPUs, and layering software on top.

Secure land with cheap power, early

The company writes that it began assembling powered land in low-cost power markets before it became independent from Arkon Energy. The starting date is given in one place as “in 2022 and 2023” and in another as “beginning in 2023”.

Today its footprint is concentrated in Norway, Portugal, Iceland, and select locations in the United States and Asia Pacific, among others. Electricity prices are often approximately 70% lower than in major U.S. power markets, the prospectus says. No source is given for this figure.

It made a large move in March 2026. It acquired the company that holds the Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia. The site is approximately 2,250 acres, and the plan is to generate power on site rather than rely on the grid. Measured as gross power, which includes cooling and the like, the company expects to develop up to 2 GW of generation capacity by the first half of 2028, and says the site is scalable to over 8 GW in the future.

The company presents its policy of choosing renewable-rich regions as a strength. Meanwhile, the risk factor about Monarch lists, among the conditions for success, access to natural gas supply at commercially viable costs and continued collaboration with Caterpillar as a supplier of natural gas generators.