AI data center builder Nscale reportedly seeking $3B IPO

Nscale Global Holdings Ltd. reportedly plans to raise $3 billion in an initial public offering that could take place as soon as next month.

Bloomberg today cited sources as saying that the London-based company intends to list its shares on a U.S. stock exchange. According to the report, it has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to manage the IPO.

The tipsters didn’t specify the valuation that Nscale is targeting. The company, which builds and operates artificial intelligence data centers, received a $14.6 billion valuation following its most recent funding round. The March raise included the participation of Nvidia Corp., Nokia Corp. and other high-profile backers.

Nscale opened its first data center last year in Norway. Today, the company is building AI infrastructure in more than a dozen locations worldwide. Bloomberg reported that Nscale hopes to grow its data center capacity from 831 megawatts to about 11 gigawatts.

The company’s flagship project is a 2,250-acre data center campus in West Virginia. Nscale estimates that the site can theoretically accommodate more than eight gigawatts of computing capacity. It will host a dedicated electrical grid with on-site power generation infrastructure.

The campus’ anchor tenant is Microsoft Corp., which commissioned 1.35 gigawatts of capacity from Nscale in March. The latter company will deliver that processing power using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 systems. Each appliance features 72 of the chipmaker’s latest Rubin graphics processing units.

Nscale will also host 300,000 previous-generation Blackwell Ultra chips for Microsoft in four other locations. The GPUs are part of an infrastructure contract reportedly worth $14 billion. Bloomberg’s sources stated that Nscale’s total contracted revenue, or the value of its data center contracts with customers, is about $51 billion.

The company offers not only GPUs but also cloud services that make its hardware easier to use. Nscale provides managed versions of the Kubernetes and Slurm frameworks, which help lower AI workloads’ infrastructure usage. Additionally, the company offers a prompt engineering tool that helps developers boost the quality of model responses.

Last month, Nscale expanded its software portfolio by acquiring startup Anyscale Inc. for $1.65 billion. The deal bought it a commercial version of Ray, an open-source tool that helps optimize AI clusters. Anyscale’s paid offering makes the software easier to use and adds observability features.

Nscale is one of two AI data center builders preparing to go public in the near future. Earlier this month, rival Switch Inc. confidently filed for an IPO that could reportedly value it at $50 billion.

Photo: Nscale