Two years ago, Nscale's infrastructure was mining bitcoin. Now it's telling IPO investors it has $51 billion in contracted AI revenue.
The London-based company is seeking to raise up to $3 billion in a US IPO that could happen as soon as September, Bloomberg reported, working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan on the offering. Deliberations are ongoing and the details, including timing, could still change.
From Bitcoin to Superintelligence
Nscale began as an offshoot of Arkon Energy, a Melbourne-based crypto mining company, emerging from stealth in December 2024 as Arkon wound down its bitcoin mining operations. Founder Josh Payne, an Australian, pivoted the infrastructure toward AI almost immediately.
The framing since has been anything but modest. Announcing the company's Series C in March, Payne described AI as "the fourth industrial revolution" and Nscale's role as "building this foundation that the market sits on, the engine of superintelligence."
Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta executive who joined Nscale's board this year, told TIME she was persuaded partly by an internal note Payne sent his executives. "The only person I'd ever seen write like that was Mark Zuckerberg," she said.
The Numbers Behind a Possible $3 Billion IPO
Nscale's growth has been fast by any standard. It raised $1.1 billion in a Series B in 2025, backed by Aker, Nvidia, Nokia and Dell, before closing a $2 billion Series C in March at a $14.6 billion valuation, both deals described by the company as the largest of their kind in European history.
A $900 million revolving credit facility followed in July, alongside a $1.65 billion acquisition of AI optimization startup Anyscale.
The company builds data centers in Norway and West Virginia, part of the same Nordic buildout MAIN covered when Nvidia was found quietly matchmaking GPU buyers with data center operators in the region.
Nscale is also hosting 300,000 Blackwell Ultra chips for Microsoft across four sites, part of a reported $14 billion infrastructure contract.
The $51 billion contracted revenue figure comes from what Nscale has told prospective investors, not an audited public filing, worth keeping in mind as a company claim rather than a confirmed number.
Joining a Crowded IPO Pipeline
Nscale wouldn't be the first AI data center company to test public markets this year. Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust raised $2 billion in May.
Csquare raised $1.21 billion in July. Rival Switch has confidentially filed for a listing that could value it near $50 billion, expected as soon as November.
That's a lot of capital-intensive infrastructure companies asking public investors to fund a buildout that's still, in Nscale's case, adding 10 gigawatts of new power capacity on top of less than a gigawatt currently active.
What This Means for Miami
Nscale's IPO would land in the same window as Anthropic's and OpenAI's expected offerings, all part of the wave of AI-related listings MAIN has tracked closely this year, adding yet another massive capital-raising event for Miami's investors to weigh alongside questions about debt-financed infrastructure and concentration risk already raised by voices like J.P. Morgan's Bill Eigen.
The crypto-to-AI pivot is also worth watching as a pattern, not just a Nscale quirk. As institutional capital keeps chasing AI infrastructure specifically, Miami's own crypto and blockchain-adjacent companies may find similar repositioning attractive, whether or not the underlying business fundamentals justify the switch as cleanly as the pitch decks suggest.
That question, whether AI infrastructure demand is durable enough to support this pace of public offerings, is exactly the one Miami's investors should be asking before treating any single IPO as confirmation the buildout is on solid ground. A $51 billion contracted revenue figure is impressive on a slide. Whether it holds up once the company faces public quarterly scrutiny is a separate matter entirely.