Nscale is asking Wall Street for a valuation of as much as $35 billion, according to the Financial Times, even after disclosing a net loss of $1.02 billion in the six months to June 30, 2026.
The two-year-old neocloud is headquartered in London and run by founder and CEO Josh Payne. It was spun out of the Australian crypto miner Arkon Energy in 2024. Its board includes former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, former U.K. deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, and former Yahoo president Susan Decker.
The company said it has $103 billion in contracts, but much of that business is not yet firm. In its S-1, management also flagged 'substantial doubt' about its ability to continue as a going concern.
Nscale's financing is tightly linked to Nvidia. Nvidia is the company's biggest supplier, one of its investors, and, depending on the IPO price, soon to be one of its largest shareholders. On Sept. 15, Nscale signed a subscription agreement for a $3.1 billion financing round, with Nvidia taking $1 billion in convertible notes or non-voting shares.
Earlier filings showed Nvidia bought warrants for more than 157,945 Nscale shares for $60 million. In exchange, Nvidia agreed to guarantee up to $860.3 million of Nscale's lease obligations at a facility in Ward County, Texas.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been unusually direct about backing these businesses. In April, he said: 'If we didn’t support CoreWeave to exist, these neoclouds, these AI clouds, wouldn’t exist... If we didn’t support Nscale, they wouldn’t be where they are today.'
That support is exactly what makes this listing more than a routine IPO. The market has already seen this movie with CoreWeave, which posted an $863 million net loss in 2024 before its March 2025 offering and disclosed that two customers made up 77% of its revenue. CoreWeave priced below its range, closed flat on day one, and then more than doubled within months.
The question now is whether investors are still willing to underwrite loss-making growth stories at a time when Treasury yields are higher and skepticism toward the AI buildout is growing. Earlier this month, warnings from Anthropic's Dario Amodei, echoed by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, helped wipe close to 6% off the semiconductor index in a single session.
Power leaves a paper trail, and this one runs through Nvidia's balance sheet. The issue is not whether capital is available; it is whether the market is being asked to price a real business or a financing loop. If Nscale clears the bar, it could set the tone for later listings from Anthropic and OpenAI. If it stumbles, Wall Street will have a cheaper way to find out where the AI infrastructure story really stands.
