London-headquartered Nscale has agreed a six-year contract worth about $45bn to rent out AI computing capacity, weeks before a US listing in which the two-year-old company is seeking as much as $3bn. Total contracted revenue shown to prospective investors now stands at roughly $51bn.
Nscale was founded in 2024 and sells graphics processing capacity for training and running AI models, the business model the market has taken to calling a "neocloud". It is developing sites in Norway and West Virginia and has said it wants to add capacity in the UK. Nvidia, Nokia, Dell and Blue Owl sit on the share register, and the board includes Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg.
The latest agreement, reported on 26 and 27 August, commits Nscale to supplying about 460 megawatts to Anthropic over six years for roughly $45bn. The capacity will run on Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems at Nscale's flagship West Virginia campus and is expected to begin serving the customer in late 2027.
It is the second contract of that scale for the company. Nscale has previously signed an agreement worth about $14bn with Microsoft, while a separate partnership with OpenAI was paused over energy costs.
The cap table has been rebuilt at speed. Nscale raised a $2bn Series C in March 2026 at a $14.6bn valuation, added a $900m revolving credit facility in July and spent $1.65bn the same month acquiring the software company Anyscale. Reported second-quarter revenue passed $100m, implying an annualised run rate of $400m to $500m — a wide gap to the $51bn backlog.
The listing is the point of all this. Nscale is working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan on a US flotation that could come as early as September and is seeking up to $3bn, according to reports on 21 August. The company has 831 megawatts of active and contracted power and has set out plans to add 10 gigawatts.
For the UK, the question is how much of that build lands at home. Nscale's UK managing director, Imran Shafi, has said the company wants to support the domestic AI ecosystem and that its UK headquarters matters to it. Grid connection delays have already slowed British data centre projects, and the new contract sends the largest single tranche of capacity to West Virginia rather than to any UK site.
A September listing would also give the UK ecosystem a rare public comparable — priced in New York rather than London.
Original source: Sifted — https://sifted.eu/articles/nscale-athropic-deal-data-centre/
