London neocloud Nscale takes its $1B loss to Wall Street

London-based tech startup Nscale has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange, marking a significant milestone after its rapid growth fueled by the AI infrastructure boom. The company, formerly a cryptocurrency miner known as Arkon Energy, plans to list under the ticker NSCL. The registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does not disclose the number of shares, expected price, or the desired valuation.

Nscale aims to achieve a valuation of up to $35 billion, though the filing reveals the company's costly expansion journey. Revenue skyrocketed from $10.4 million to $140.6 million in six months, but its net loss ballooned from $368.9 million to $1.02 billion during the same period. Nscale reported $103.4 billion in total contract value (TCV) as of August 31, a figure not recognized as revenue or conventional backlog.

Only $2.6 billion was tied to active contracts, with the rest contingent on financed and built projects. Major banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will serve as lead bookrunners for the offering. Nscale operates datacenters across Europe and the US, positioning itself as a full-stack AI cloud provider, supplying infrastructure and software for AI model training and execution.

Its projects include an AI campus for OpenAI in Norway and a Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia, developed with Nvidia and Microsoft. The company's board features former British deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg, Meta's former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and Yahoo's former president Susan Decker. Despite its London base and influence in Britain's AI infrastructure sector, Nscale opted for the New York listing, following the path of Arm, which also chose Wall Street for its listing.

The decision highlights the allure of Wall Street's deeper pool of technology-focused capital and the potential for higher valuations compared to London.