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Nscale, the London-based AI infrastructure company with a $14.6 billion private valuation, has added Fidji Simo to its board of directors. Simo serves as CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI, making her one of the highest-profile executives to join the company’s governance structure as it prepares for a US initial public offering.
Founded in 2024 by Josh Payne and Nathan Townsend, Nscale has moved from stealth mode to IPO track at a pace that makes most Silicon Valley growth stories look leisurely.
A board built for Wall Street
Simo joins a boardroom that already reads like a who’s who of Big Tech alumni. Earlier this year, Nscale brought on former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg and former Yahoo president Susan Decker. Nick Clegg, the former UK Deputy Prime Minister turned tech executive, also joined the board.
Nscale is targeting a US IPO as early as September 2026, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan advising on the offering. The company is simultaneously pursuing up to $3.5 billion in pre-IPO financing. That breaks down into roughly $1.5 billion in convertible notes and approximately $2 billion from Nvidia, which is both a strategic backer and a key supplier of the GPU hardware that powers Nscale’s data centers.
The company’s most recent private valuation of $14.6 billion came out of a $2 billion Series C round in March 2026. Nscale emerged from stealth in late 2024 after raising $155 million in Series A funding.
$103 billion in contracted revenue
As of early March 2026, the company reported approximately $51 billion in contracted revenue. That figure then roughly doubled to around $103 billion following a major deal with Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude family of models.
The company also holds major compute contracts with Microsoft and has established partnerships with OpenAI, Simo’s employer. Nscale positions itself as a full-stack AI infrastructure provider, building and operating data centers optimized specifically for AI workloads. The company is developing facilities across multiple countries and targeting an additional 10 gigawatts of power generation capacity. Strategic backers beyond Nvidia include Aker, the Norwegian industrial investment company, and Dell, which supplies server hardware for large-scale compute deployments.
From crypto mining to AI compute
Nscale’s origins trace back to crypto mining infrastructure. The company pivoted from that original focus to become a dedicated AI infrastructure provider, a transition that mirrors a broader industry trend. Data center operations, power procurement, cooling systems, and GPU fleet management are relevant whether you’re hashing blocks or training language models.
CoreWeave, another GPU cloud provider, went public in early 2025 and offered a reference point for how the market values these businesses. The $3.5 billion in pre-IPO financing includes convertible notes and strategic investment from Nvidia, meaning the company is raising a significant chunk of capital before ever touching public markets.
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