Nscale, a London-based AI infrastructure company, has added Fidji Simo, CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI, to its board of directors. This move comes as the company gears up for a US initial public offering (IPO) as early as September 2026, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan advising on the offering. Nscale, founded in 2024 by Josh Payne and Nathan Townsend, has quickly grown, achieving a $14.6 billion private valuation in March 2026 after a $2 billion Series C round. Simo joins other prominent tech figures on the board, including former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, former Yahoo president Susan Decker, and former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
The company is also pursuing up to $3.5 billion in pre-IPO financing. This includes approximately $1.5 billion in convertible notes and about $2 billion from Nvidia, a strategic backer and key supplier of GPU hardware. This pre-IPO financing structure suggests a potential IPO valuation cap of $30 billion, more than double its Series C valuation, though analysts note this is a cautious signal from private investors. Nscale's contracted revenue backlog surged to $103 billion after securing a major $45 billion deal with Anthropic, adding to existing contracts with companies like Microsoft. Its annualized run-rate revenue is estimated at $400-$500 million, a typical figure for rapidly expanding infrastructure companies.
Nscale positions itself as a full-stack AI infrastructure provider, developing and operating data centers optimized for AI workloads globally, targeting an additional 10 gigawatts of power generation capacity. Strategic backers include Nvidia, Norwegian industrial investment company Aker, and Dell. The company's rapid growth and significant pre-IPO financing draw comparisons to CoreWeave, another GPU cloud provider that went public in early 2025. Nscale's business model involves designing, building, and operating data centers filled with Nvidia GPUs, then renting this compute capacity to AI labs and hyperscalers under multi-year contracts.
