Nscale, the London AI infrastructure company, has filed to list in New York. Its prospectus, sent to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on September 18, puts the face value of signed customer deals at $103.4bn. What is actually switched on is 55 megawatts (MW).
Those contracts are not sales. About $1.9bn of paper value sits against every megawatt that is live today. The UK company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL. Reports put its target valuation at $30bn to $35bn, at least double the $14.6bn mark of March.
What Did We Say About Nscale in June?
In June we called Nscale Europe’s strongest private bet on AI infrastructure, and said it was not yet sovereign. We judged it on four tests: where the data sits, who the customers are, whose chips it runs, and whether it could cope if demand shifted. Microsoft was the anchor customer, the biggest deployment was a leased site in Texas, and OpenAI had stepped back from Stargate Norway.
The S-1 confirms the customer and chip picture, updates the map, and leaves the fourth test open. It says that in April 2026 “OpenAI withdrew from the Stargate Norway and Stargate UK partnerships”. Texas is still there, at 270MW in Ward County, but the largest site is now 460MW in West Virginia, signed with Anthropic in August. SEC records also show Nscale had filed in confidence on 17 February, nearly three weeks before the $14.6bn round.
The Microsoft relationship has grown too. In June we cited reports valuing its October 2025 deal at $14bn to $23bn. The S-1 puts all Microsoft orders signed from September 2025 to April 2026 at up to $43.8bn, running to December 2033.
What Does $103bn of “Contracted Value” Mean?
The $103.4bn in Nscale’s S-1 is the face value of deals it says it has signed, including work that has not been built yet. It is not money earned. The S-1 calls it total contract value, or TCV: “the aggregate revenue contracted across the full committed term of signed customer agreements, measured at date the contract is signed and excluding any optional extensions, renewals, unexercised capacity, or any significant financing components relating to upfront payments”.
To put it simply the hourly price, times the chips, times every hour of the years a customer has signed for. A contract only starts to earn when Nscale delivers a working cluster of GPUs, the chips that train and run AI models. Of the 461,000 GPUs under contract, about 25,000 are running.
So far only $2.6bn of the $103.4bn is “active”, meaning the service has started. Revenue in the first half of 2026 was $140.6m, and the net loss $1.02bn.
Who Makes Up the $103bn?
Microsoft and Anthropic sit behind most of the $103.4bn. Microsoft has signed for up to $43.8bn. Anthropic signed four agreements on 25 August worth up to $44.6bn, all at the West Virginia campus, whose first phase is due by the first half of 2028.
Their “up to” amounts equal about 85% of the total, by our sum; the S-1 does not split TCV by customer. Under the Anthropic order form filed with the S-1, Anthropic can end a late tranche “without any payment or other obligation or liability of any kind”. Nscale says it has not yet secured the financing to build it.
What the contracts do not show is price. The Anthropic form has 101 redactions, including the price per GPU-hour, the number of GPUs and the site. The Microsoft form also hides its prices. So the filing shows who is paying, not how much per hour.
Who Owns Nscale Now?
Aker, the Oslo-listed industrial investor, is still the European anchor. The S-1 then adds a layer of note investors on top of the three holders already at 5% or more. It leaves every share count and percentage blank until the price is set.
| Holder | Who is behind it | What the filings show |
|---|---|---|
| Aker DC Holding | Aker ASA, controlled by Kjell Inge Røkke | Holds 5% or more |
| Sandton Capital Partners | A New York investment manager | Holds 5% or more through four funds |
| Paladin Capital Limited | Held by the Jersey trustees of a trust set up by Josh Payne, the chief executive | Holds 5% or more; Payne has no voting power over these shares |
| NVIDIA | Chip supplier and existing shareholder | $1bn of new notes that become non-voting shares |
| Note investors | Led by Third Point, with Apollo, Citadel and others | $2.36bn of notes that become shares at the listing |
The note package closed on September 25 at $3.36bn: $2.36bn up front and $1bn from NVIDIA due around 16 November. The note investors are mostly hedge funds and asset managers rather than the venture firms backing European AI start-ups. NVIDIA’s position is the unusual one. It sells Nscale its chips, buys $1.2bn of capacity from it in Iceland, the UK and Norway, and guarantees up to $860m of its Texas lease.
Its $1bn of pre-IPO notes turn into shares that “shall not be entitled to vote”. NVIDIA can add to its stake without adding votes.
Payne has a new award too: 19.1 million performance shares granted on 31 July, about 2.5% of the company and worth roughly $350m on that date. They vest in slices from September 2028 to July 2032. Forty percent depends on the share price, 40% on megawatts delivered under key contracts, and 20% on other operational targets.
Where Are Nscale’s Data Centres?
All five sites the S-1 lists as active are in Portugal, Norway and Iceland, and 97% of first-half revenue came from Portugal and Norway. Most of the signed capacity, though, is American.
| Europe | United States | |
|---|---|---|
| Sites (active) | 12 (5) | 4 (0) |
| Live capacity | 55MW | None |
| Signed IT capacity | 576MW | 770MW |
| Customers named at sites | Microsoft (Sines, Norway), Nvidia | Anthropic (West Virginia) |
| Share of first-half revenue | 97% | Not broken out |
Europe’s part includes 200MW that Nscale owns at Sines in Portugal, where Microsoft plans more than 66,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin chips from late 2027, two 100MW sites in Norway and smaller ones in the UK and Iceland. The S-1 also lists a 24MW site in Indonesia, which sits outside the Europe / US split above.
The US part is bigger. In March Nscale bought the Monarch Compute Campus in Mason County, West Virginia. It says the site can grow to over 8GW of gross power, with the first 2GW (1.37GW for computing) due by the first half of 2028, powered on site by Caterpillar natural gas generators rather than the grid.
When it announced the deal, Nscale also announced a letter of intent from Microsoft for 1.35GW there. The S-1 does not mention that letter. Semafor reported that Microsoft walked away over the summer. The S-1’s own timeline shows Anthropic taking 460MW instead.
How much is actually running? A chart in the S-1’s summary puts “active capacity”, the megawatts “online and revenue generating”, at 55MW: 48MW in rented colocation space and 7MW at sites Nscale owns. We have compared European and US AI infrastructure separately.
Does Nscale Pass Our Four Tests Now?
The S-1 uses the word “sovereign” 64 times. The site table is the better guide. On the four tests we used in June, two are mixed and two fail.
- Data location: mixed. The five active sites, and so all 55MW live, are in Europe; 56% of signed capacity is in the US.
- Customer mix: fail. Microsoft’s and Anthropic’s “up to” amounts equal about 85% of contracted value.
- Chips: fail. Every GPU model the S-1 names is NVIDIA’s, and NVIDIA is also a customer, shareholder and lease guarantor.
- Operational independence: mixed. Most signed capacity is at owned sites, but 48MW of the 55MW live is rented space.
What Does a New York Listing Do to the “European” Claim?
Nscale plc will be a UK company with a London head office. The New York listing tests that European claim rather than settling it. It filed on Form S-1, the standard prospectus for US domestic issuers, rather than the F-1 many foreign companies use, and it reports in dollars under US accounting rules. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley lead 23 banks; five are European: Deutsche Bank, Credit Agricole, ABN AMRO, DNB Carnegie and SEB.
CoreWeave listed in New York as an American neocloud, a specialist cloud built for AI. Nscale is trying to list as one with a London address.
The listing will show what investors pay for $103.4bn of contracts and 55MW that is live. It will not show who in Europe uses the computing power: the customers behind the contracts the S-1 describes, Microsoft, Anthropic, NVIDIA and Figure AI, are all American.
What Does the Filing Settle?
The price range, the ownership percentages and the financing for Anthropic’s campus, “in process” in the S-1’s words, are still to come.
In June the question was whether $14.6bn bought a sovereign champion. At $30bn to $35bn it is the same question, with numbers attached, asked in New York.
Author: Akos Szima
See Also:
Where Will Europe Actually Put Its Data Centres?
Europe vs US AI Infrastructure: Who’s Winning?
Is Nscale Really European Sovereign AI? The $14.6bn Question
How We Checked This:
We read the S-1 of 18 September 2026, its Microsoft and Anthropic contract forms and Nscale’s 25 September release. Regional megawatt totals are our sums of the S-1’s site table.
Frequently Asked Questions:
No. It is total contract value: what customers have agreed to pay over the full term of signed contracts. Only $2.6 billion of it relates to services that have started.
Nscale has not set a date or a price range. Its S-1, filed on 18 September 2026, says it intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL.
