An Anthropic megadeal takes Nscale's backlog to $103B — and its valuation toward $30B

When we wrote about Nscale in August, the London company building data centres and GPU capacity for AI was preparing a US listing on the back of a $51B contracted backlog. In the weeks since, the numbers have roughly doubled. Nscale has signed a reported ~$45B compute deal with Anthropic, its backlog has climbed to around $103B, and it is lining up a $3.5B pre-IPO round that would value it close to $30B — twice the $14.6B it was worth in March.

The Anthropic deal is the engine of it. Under the six-year agreement, reported in late August, Anthropic will take 460 megawatts of capacity at Nscale’s Monarch campus in West Virginia, running on NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips. What makes it striking is the backdrop: the deal landed only weeks after Microsoft walked away from a 1.35-gigawatt commitment at the same site. One hyperscaler stepped back and one AI lab stepped in, and in doing so pushed Nscale’s contracted revenue from roughly $51B to about $103B almost overnight.

The money is following. Nscale is in advanced talks on a $3.5B pre-IPO financing — around $2B of it from NVIDIA, alongside up to $1.5B in convertible notes led by Daniel Loeb’s Third Point — targeting a valuation near $30B ahead of a US IPO that could raise a further $3B or so, with Goldman Sachs advising. For a company founded in 2024, doubling to a $30B valuation in six months is a remarkable trajectory, and one of the clearest signs yet that a British firm can play at the very top of the global compute game.

The caveat is the same one we raised in August, only larger. That $103B is a contracted backlog, not money in the bank: multi-year deals are counted in full the moment they are signed, years before a chip is switched on, and Nscale still has to build gigawatts of capacity — its West Virginia site is not expected online in phases until 2028 — to deliver on them. Microsoft’s exit is itself a reminder that even signed commitments can move. And there is a circularity worth naming: NVIDIA is anchoring the round of a company whose backlog it will help fill by selling it the chips, a pattern now drawing scrutiny across the whole AI-infrastructure boom. Concentrating that much future revenue in a handful of giant customers cuts both ways.

For the UK, the story is genuinely double-edged. On one hand, a two-year-old British company is now among the most consequential “neocloud” players anywhere, exactly the kind of home-grown compute champion the government’s sovereign-AI ambitions are meant to cultivate, alongside FluidStack and Ori. On the other, its flagship campus is in West Virginia and its listing will be in New York — a reminder that “British” compute, at this scale, still largely gets built and valued in America. Either way, Nscale’s float is now one of the most important tests going of whether the neocloud model pays off.