Nscale is reportedly seeking to raise as much as $3 billion through a US stock market listing as the British AI infrastructure company pursues a rapidly expanding portfolio of multi-gigawatt data centre projects.

According to Bloomberg, the IPO could take place as soon as September, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase working with Nscale on the offering. While the scale of the offering pales in comparison to the rumoured $100 billion that Anthropic is reportedly looking to raise as part of its IPO, it is another example of a blockbuster listing from a firm linked to the AI boom. 

Of course, this isn’t completely out of the blue. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan were reported to have been hired to prepare for an IPO in February, and earlier reports have suggested that the firm was eyeing the second half of 2026. That puts the rumoured IPO launch right on track – but what has changed is the scale. 

Nscale is still a relatively small business in comparison to some of the AI giants operating in the marketplace. Sure, the firm has managed to increase its valuation significantly over the last few years, but it’s still not exactly competing with the Microsofts or even the Oracles of the world. 

In February, Nscale signed a $1.4 billion GPU-backed loan to finance compute clusters in Norway, Portugal, Iceland and the UK. It then raised $2 billion in Series C funding in March, valuing the business at $14.6 billion, before securing $790 million of financing for its Narvik data centre and a $900 million revolving credit facility in July.

All those deals had different purposes to the IPO, however. The GPU-backed loan is intended to fund hardware deployments, the Narvik financing supports a specific data centre project, while the revolving facility provides flexible liquidity across Nscale’s wider build-out. An IPO could give the company another substantial pool of equity capital as it attempts to build data centre capacity, secure power and deploy increasingly expensive generations of AI hardware across several markets.

There’s a lot that Nscale could buy for $3 billion too – especially when paired with its existing war chest – and it’s already clear where it’s looking to spend the money. 

Despite being a British company, the US is the market that is likely to receive the lion’s share of the funding. Nscale says its Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia is designed to support 1.35 GW of AI compute in its first phase, with the site capable of expanding beyond 8 GW. More than $20 billion of capital investment is planned for the campus, where Nscale has signed a letter of intent with Microsoft covering up to 1.35 GW of AI compute using NVIDIA Vera Rubin systems.

That doesn’t mean it’s not also scaling up in Europe. The company’s Narvik campus is designed for 230 MW, while Nscale has agreed to deploy more than 66,000 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs for Microsoft at the Sines Data Campus in Portugal. The Portuguese agreement also includes €695 million of additional Nscale investment in shared infrastructure and a second 200 MW building.

Not every project can be accelerated with financing alone, however. Nscale’s planned £2 billion Loughton facility in Essex has already been hit by delays to its 90 MW grid connection, forcing the company to explore alternative power options as it tries to keep the project on track for 2027.

But the scale of the financing should help Nscale with its growth. The firm is already reported to have around $51 billion of contracted revenue and is working to add 10 GW of power capacity to its footprint. A $3 billion IPO would help it scale further, and would be sizable in comparison with CoreWeave’s US listing in March last year, which raised about $1.5 billion after the AI infrastructure company reduced the size and price of its offering.

Of course, Nscale could be forced to downscale its IPO too, but with investors chomping at the bit to invest in AI infrastructure, as proven by the blockbuster IPO of SpaceX, Nscale could find it has hit the sweet spot with the size of its offering.