Nscale Targets $35B IPO Valuation Amid AI Data Center Delays and Fire

British AI data center developer Nscale is seeking to raise up to $3B in an IPO as soon as this month at a valuation of as much as $35B, according to Bloomberg, even as its IPO filings show the company had built less than 1% of its overall targeted capacity in gigawatts through August. At Nscale's flagship Glomfjord facility in Norway, being built for TikTok parent ByteDance, construction is six months behind schedule with only 6.4 megawatts of the intended 30-megawatt site operational following liquid cooling pipe leaks, local regulatory hurdles, and a December transformer fire that led Norwegian regulators to cite 10 safety violations before the case was closed in September. Spun out of a crypto mining operation in 2024, Nscale has amassed more than $103B in contracts, relying on Microsoft and Anthropic for about 85% of that total, while leaning heavily on leased capacity from other providers to meet obligations. For Anthropic's agreement to spend about $44.6B at the Monarch campus in West Virginia, Nscale disclosed in IPO filings that it had not secured the required financing or long-term chip supplier agreements, and that Anthropic can back out of late tranches without penalty. "Every layer is a bottleneck. If any layer is not optimized, it slows down everything above it." — Josh Payne, Nscale CEO.