Nscale reveals ByteDance relationship in IPO filing, accounting for 75% of sales

Nscale, a UK-based AI cloud provider racing toward a US listing, filed its S-1 on September 18, 2026, with a notable omission. The company disclosed that a single unnamed customer accounted for 73% of its $33 million in 2025 revenue. It did not, however, name that customer as ByteDance, the Beijing-headquartered parent company of TikTok.

Subsequent reporting filled in the gap. ByteDance has been renting access to 2,304 Nvidia B200 GPUs housed at Nscale’s Glomfjord data center in Norway, a relationship that began in May 2025 and was partly underwritten by a $105 million loan from Macquarie. For a company seeking a $30B to $35B valuation on the NYSE, having three-quarters of your revenue flowing from a single entity subject to intense US-China regulatory scrutiny is, to put it mildly, a complication.

The numbers tell two stories

On one hand, Nscale’s growth trajectory is genuinely staggering. The company posted $33 million in total revenue for 2025 and then reported $140.6 million for just the first half of 2026. That translates to 1,252% year-over-year revenue growth.

On the other hand, there’s a $1.02 billion net loss in H1 2026 sitting right alongside that revenue line. And ByteDance’s share of revenue, while declining from 73% in 2025, still represented 52% of H1 2026’s haul.

Nscale projects that ByteDance’s revenue share will dip below 20% in 2026 as contracts with Microsoft and Anthropic ramp up. The company says its total contracted value exceeds $100 billion.

From crypto mining to AI cloud

Nscale’s origin story adds another layer. The company spun off from Arkon Energy in early 2024, pivoting from cryptocurrency mining operations to AI cloud infrastructure.

Since the spinoff, Nscale has raised aggressively. A March 2026 Series C round valued the company at $14.6 billion, and it has secured $3.1 billion in convertible notes. One of those note investors: Nvidia itself, which contributed $1 billion.

The company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands but headquartered in the UK, and it plans to list on the NYSE under the ticker NSCL. The proposed valuation of $30B to $35B would represent roughly a 2x to 2.4x jump from the Series C price just months earlier.

The ByteDance problem

Nscale’s S-1 identified the concentration risk in percentage terms but left the customer unnamed. This is technically permissible under SEC rules, which require disclosure of material customer concentration but don’t always mandate naming the customer.

The arrangement itself is notable for its structure. ByteDance accesses Nvidia’s B200 chips through Nscale’s Norwegian data center, effectively routing around direct US export restrictions that limit the sale of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies. Norway is not subject to the same export controls as the US, though Washington has been steadily pressuring allied nations to tighten their chip export policies.

The $105 million Macquarie loan backing the Glomfjord facility adds financial leverage to an already concentrated bet.

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