Nscale is heading for the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL, and the filing puts its numbers on the table. Bloomberg pulled out the one that matters here: of the $103 billion in total contract value the British data center developer disclosed ahead of the IPO, 85% sits with two customers. Microsoft and Anthropic.
Then comes the sentence that does the damage. Nscale hasn’t secured financing for the Anthropic deal yet.
The numbers in the prospectus
The rest of the numbers explain why that sentence matters. In the first half of 2026 Nscale booked $140.6 million in revenue, against $10.4 million a year earlier – up 1,252%. Over the same period it posted a net loss of $1.02 billion. A single unnamed customer accounted for more than half of revenue.
The company carries more than $8 billion in debt, not counting a financing arrangement with Dell. As of August 31 it held 25,000 active GPUs and 461,000 that were active or contracted, across five live and twelve contracted sites. Nvidia has guaranteed up to $860 million on a Texas data center lease.
Nscale spun out of crypto miner Arkon Energy in 2024. Founder and CEO Josh Payne is 32. The board includes Nick Clegg, Sheryl Sandberg and, since last week, Fidji Simo.
Why this concerns Anthropic
I wrote about the $45 billion compute deal between Anthropic and Nscale at the end of August, back when the IPO was still ahead. The prospectus flips the angle. It isn’t Anthropic that depends on a supplier here. The supplier depends on Anthropic.
It still means something for Anthropic. The company plans to go public in November on a $100 billion annual run rate. The compute behind that is under contract, but part of it sits with a provider that still has to raise the money to build it.
Whose risk this actually is
With neoclouds, contract value always sounds like safety. It is a promise in two directions: the customer promises to pay, the provider promises to deliver. If the financing isn’t there, the second half is still open.
Anthropic has spread its bets over the past months – Google, Amazon, Nscale, plus the Queensland lease. That probably wasn’t only about capacity.