Microsoft and Anthropic dominate Nscale's $103B IPO contract backlog

Microsoft and Anthropic dominate Nscale's $103B IPO contract backlog

Mon, September 21, 2026 at 8:34 PM GMT+3 2 min read

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Nscale Limited filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange last week, revealing that Microsoft and Anthropic together account for 85% of its $103 billion in total contract value, according to Bloomberg.

The British AI infrastructure company, which builds data centers for AI services, has signed multiple agreements with Microsoft since late 2025 worth about $43.8 billion through 2033, according to Bloomberg. In August, Nscale signed a separate $44.6 billion agreement with Anthropic to supply computing power at a planned eight-gigawatt facility in West Virginia. Nscale has not yet secured financing for the Anthropic deal.

The Anthropic contract comes with significant conditions attached. Under the terms of the deal, Nscale must reach defined milestones and sustain reliable levels of computing performance, and failure to do so gives Anthropic grounds to walk away, according to Bloomberg. Nscale is targeting 2028 as the year it will activate the facility's initial two gigawatts of capacity.

Nscale acknowledged the concentration risk in its S-1 filing. "A substantial portion of our revenue is driven by a limited number of our customers," the company said in the filing. Only $2.6 billion of the $103 billion in total contract value was active as of the end of August, according to Bloomberg.

For the first six months of 2026, Nscale posted a $1.02 billion net loss against $140.6 million in revenue; that revenue figure represents a 1,252% jump from $10.4 million in the comparable prior-year period. It also pointed to $56.4 billion in remaining performance obligations, according to CNBC.

Nscale's ties to Nvidia add another layer of dependency. Nvidia has participated in funding rounds, provided chips for Nscale's data centers, and guaranteed approximately $860 million in lease obligations. Nvidia also took part in a $3.1 billion financing package announced last week, in which it received $1 billion in the form of convertible notes or non-voting shares. Nscale cautioned in its filing that even this close partnership does "not eliminate supply chain risks" that might hold up delivery of the chips its data centers depend on.

Nscale, which struck the Anthropic deal in August, is among a cluster of neocloud companies that have grown alongside the AI boom by leasing Nvidia graphics processing units to AI developers. Competitors include CoreWeave and Nebius. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley are serving as lead underwriters for the offering, the company said. Nscale has applied to list under the ticker symbol "NSCL."