Nscale Weighs Delaying Its $35 Billion New York Listing Until Next Year

Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report, and Nscale did not respond to its request for comment.

A delay would be a setback for a company that has become a bellwether for investor appetite for AI data centre builders. Nscale filed for its initial public offering in September, seeking about $3.5 billion, including $2 billion from Nvidia, and plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL.

Since then, its main customer has scaled back. Last week Microsoft decided not to exercise an option that would have more than doubled its existing agreement to rent computing power from Nscale at a Texas data centre, according to Reuters, which cited a person familiar with the matter after the Financial Times first reported the decision. That person said the decision had been made several months earlier, before the IPO filing, and did not change Nscale's total contract value of about $103 billion. The existing Texas contract stands, and Nscale is talking to several large customers about the remaining capacity at the site.

Nscale's IPO filing valued its statements of work with Microsoft at up to about $43.8 billion through December 2033, excluding optional extensions, according to Reuters. Weeks before the Texas decision, Microsoft withdrew from a deal to anchor Nscale's flagship UK site in Loughton, Essex, after delays in connecting power pushed expected supply into the 2030s.

The market is also less friendly than when Nscale filed. AI stocks have sold off over the past month, and Anthropic is marketing its own listing this week. Its updated prospectus seeks a valuation of up to $1.4 trillion, slightly below some investors' expectations. Investors widely see the Anthropic offering as a test of Wall Street's faith in the AI boom, and its reception is likely to shape whether Nscale decides to wait.