London-headquartered AI infrastructure group Nscale has raised $3.36bn (about £2.5bn) in convertible notes led by hedge fund Third Point, with $2.36bn funded at closing and a further $1bn from Nvidia due in mid-November. The notes convert into equity when the company lists on the New York Stock Exchange.
Nscale was spun out of Australian bitcoin miner Arkon Energy in 2024. It has since become one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies to come out of the UK, owning power, data centre campuses, GPU clusters and the cloud software that sells that capacity on.
The new financing lands one week after the company filed its S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 18 September. It plans to list on the NYSE under the ticker NSCL.
The deal
The round is structured as a pre-IPO convertible rather than a priced equity round. Third Point leads. The other participants include funds managed by Apollo, Citadel, Hudson Bay Capital, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and 8090 Industries, alongside Davidson Kempner, Qube Research & Technologies and Wellington Management.
Nvidia's $1bn tranche is the largest single commitment. The chipmaker has now backed Nscale's Series B, a pre-Series C SAFE and the Series C, as well as this round. Nvidia is therefore both a shareholder and the supplier behind most of Nscale's hardware roadmap.
The conversion terms, including any discount to the IPO price or a valuation cap, were not disclosed. Those terms will decide how much of the post-listing cap table goes to noteholders rather than to existing shareholders.
The numbers behind the raise
The convertible adds to a run of financings over the past six months:
- March 2026: $2bn Series C at a $14.6bn valuation
- July 2026: $900m revolving credit facility
- August 2026: about $3bn of delayed-draw term loans for sites in Texas and North Carolina
- Earlier: a $1.4bn GPU-backed term loan and $790m for its Narvik development in Norway
The Financial Times has reported that the listing could value Nscale at about $35bn, more than double the March price. Bloomberg has reported a target raise of about $3bn in the offering.
The S-1 shows revenue of $140.6m in the first half of 2026, up from $10.4m a year earlier, and a net loss of about $1.02bn. Nscale reported $103.4bn of active and contracted total contract value at 31 August, compared with $38.0bn at the end of 2025. That covers about 461,000 GPUs. Only $2.6bn of that total is currently active, and the rest depends on capacity being financed, built and powered over the coming years.
What's next
Nscale says the proceeds will go into its power pipeline, which it puts at more than 10GW, and into liquid-cooled data centres, GPU capacity and its cloud platform across 14 regions. Its largest projects include Microsoft deployments in the US and Europe, and a potential 1.35GW campus in West Virginia built around Nvidia Vera Rubin systems.
For UK investors, the listing will be a test of whether one of the country's most valuable private technology companies can be priced in New York with a capital structure that relies this heavily on debt and convertibles.
Original source: TechCrunch — https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/25/ahead-of-u-s-ipo-british-ai-neocloud-nscale-secures-3-36b-in-convertible-finacing/
