Nscale files for the NYSE with $1bn of losses and a $44.6bn Anthropic deal

Nscale Limited, the London-headquartered AI data centre operator, publicly filed its registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 18 September and intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL. The filing sets no price and admits there is no public market for the shares yet, which is the usual way of saying the interesting numbers are all in the accounts rather than in the offer.

The numbers are not subtle

Revenue for the six months to 30 June 2026 was $140.6 million, against $10.4 million in the same half of 2025, a rise of 1,252%. Full-year revenue for 2025 was $33.0 million, up 73% from $19.1 million in 2024. The company was incorporated in May 2024, and it is losing money at a comparable rate of change: net losses were $1,020.1 million for the first half of 2026, after $761.8 million across 2025 and $78.2 million in 2024. Adjusted EBITDA for the first half was negative $199.2 million.

The contracted pile is the actual story

As of 31 August 2026 Nscale reported $2.6 billion of active total contract value and $103.4 billion of active and contracted TCV under long-term take-or-pay agreements, against $0.5 billion and $38.0 billion at the end of 2025, with a weighted average contract life of 5.7 years. In hardware terms that is roughly 25,000 active GPUs and 461,000 active and contracted GPUs, about 1.37 gigawatts of active and contracted capacity across five active and twelve contracted sites, and what the filing calls line of sight to approximately 10 gigawatts of potential power capacity. Nearly all of that contracted business is capacity that does not exist yet.

Anthropic, Microsoft and Nvidia are all in the paperwork

On 25 August 2026 Nscale signed a series of GPU services agreements with Anthropic covering dedicated infrastructure at its Monarch Compute Campus running Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, with aggregate payments to Nscale of up to about $44.6 billion, contingent on delivery and service availability. A Microsoft collaboration will deploy more than 66,000 of the same Nvidia systems at the 200 MW SINES Data Campus in Portugal from late 2027. Then on 15 September the company agreed a subscription for a minimum of $3.1 billion, made up of $2.1 billion of unsecured convertible loan notes and a further $1.0 billion in convertible loan notes or non-voting shares to be issued to Nvidia, a transaction the filing calls the Nvidia Sale and expects to close on or around 16 November 2026.

What the market makes of it

Renaissance Capital estimates the offering at around $2.0 billion. Nscale has been assembling the business in public view: it bought the Monarch Compute Campus and AIPCorp in March 2026, added the 200 MW SIN02 site at Sines in April, and agreed to acquire the AI software platform Anyscale in July. Those purchases explain a good chunk of the loss column, and they also explain why the company needs public money rather than another private round.

Our opinion

The gap between $103.4 billion of contracted value and $140.6 million of six-month revenue is not a red flag so much as the entire business model written in two figures: Nscale sells capacity years before it exists and builds it with money that arrives afterwards. That works while AI demand keeps climbing and the power keeps getting connected. It gets uncomfortable the moment either stalls, because a take-or-pay contract is only as good as the customer's appetite for the bill. The detail I keep returning to is Nvidia taking up to $1.0 billion of convertible notes and non-voting shares in a company whose cash is largely spent on Nvidia hardware that Nvidia's own biggest customer has agreed to rent. That is a circle, and public market investors are about to be asked to stand inside it. Nscale looks like a real business with real customers; whether it is a good investment depends on a cost of capital that has not been named yet.