AI Cloud Startup Nscale Files for IPO at Up to $35 Billion Valuation — With a $1 Billion Loss to Match
The AI infrastructure firm's revenue surged more than 1,200% in six months, but so did its losses, as it races to build data centers fast enough to keep up with $103 billion in contracted demand.
Nscale Limited filed paperwork Friday for a U.S. initial public offering that could value the AI cloud computing company at as much as $35 billion, according to a Form S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "NSCL," with Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley leading the offering.
The filing shows revenue for the first six months of 2026 surged more than 1,252% year-over-year to $140.6 million, up from just $10.4 million in the same period a year earlier, per Reuters. But the growth came at a steep cost: net losses for the same period ballooned to just over $1 billion, up from $368.9 million a year earlier, as the company poured cash into building out data-center capacity.
Contracts worth more than $100 billion, but a hunger for cash
Nscale's active and contracted total contract value reached $103.4 billion as of August 31, up from $38 billion at the end of 2025, reflecting the scramble among AI companies to lock in long-term, take-or-pay computing capacity deals. Reports ahead of the filing suggested the company could seek to raise as much as $3 billion in the offering, though the exact size and price range were not disclosed in the S-1.
REVENUE UP 1,252% — LOSSES UP EVEN FASTER
The filing lands amid a broader wave of AI infrastructure financing this year, including CoreWeave's recent $3.7 billion convertible bond sale and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's forecast that the chipmaker will sell twice as many AI chips next year. Nscale is betting investors will look past its widening losses toward the scale of its contracted revenue pipeline, a pitch several other AI infrastructure firms are making simultaneously as they compete for a limited pool of public capital.
Nscale has not set a date for its roadshow or pricing, and the number of shares to be offered was left blank in the filing, a standard placeholder ahead of formal marketing. The IPO market for AI infrastructure names will face its next major test with Nscale's pricing, expected in the coming weeks.