Nvidia-backed Nscale pitches $103 billion in contracted revenue ahead of its IPO after a $33 million year
Key points
- Nscale pitching $103 billion in contracted revenue
- It generated about $33 million of revenue in 2025
- CoreWeave (CRWV) reports a similar headline figure on a much larger revenue base
Nscale, the London-based AI cloud company backed by Nvidia (NVDA), is telling prospective investors it has about $103 billion in contracted revenue ahead of a US listing, The Information reported. That's up from the $51 billion it was pitching in early August. The jump is mostly one deal, a compute agreement with Anthropic worth about $45 billion.
Here's the number I keep coming back to. Nscale generated about $33 million of revenue in all of 2025.
Anthropic is a substantial counterparty. But contracted revenue counts the full value of a multi-year agreement the day it's signed, and Nscale's contracts run 5.7 years on average, so $103 billion works out to something like $18 billion a year if all of it gets delivered and paid. The company's actual second quarter came in above $100 million. Annualize that and you're at $400 million or so against an $18 billion implied pace. That comparison ignores the planned ramp, but it shows how much execution the contracts require.
The revenue itself is growing fast, and that part is on the record. Nscale went from about $33 million in 2025 to about $37 million in the first quarter of 2026, then above $100 million in the second, Bloomberg reported on August 6. The second-quarter figure doesn't include Anthropic, whose deal covers about 460 megawatts at the West Virginia development we wrote about and runs six years.
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CoreWeave reports a similar backlog with a larger operating base
The comparison worth making is already public and backed by SEC-filed financial results. CoreWeave (CRWV), the largest listed AI neocloud by revenue, told investors on August 11 that its revenue backlog stood at $104 billion. That is within about a billion dollars of what Nscale is claiming now.
The two figures are not known to measure the same thing, and that matters more than the near match. CoreWeave's quarterly report carries $103.7 billion of unsatisfied remaining performance obligations as of June 30. The filing defines the term, nets out estimated variable consideration, and says when the company expects to recognize the money: 41% in the 24 months to June 2028, 39% in the two years after that, and the rest by month 78. The word backlog does not appear in that filing once. Nscale has not filed anything, so nobody outside the company knows what its $103 billion nets out, what cancellation rights sit behind it, or when any of it is supposed to land. CoreWeave is one of the companies on our AI infrastructure backlog and RPO tracker, which collects the disclosed figures across the sector.
"Revenue backlog ended the quarter at $104 billion, up 246% year-over-year," said Nitin Agrawal, chief financial officer of CoreWeave, on the company's second-quarter earnings call. He said that figure leaves out more than $25 billion of net new customer commitments signed early in the third quarter, and that more than half of the existing backlog is already attached to contracts where delivery has started.
Now look at what sits underneath the two numbers. CoreWeave reported $2.6 billion of revenue in that quarter, up 112% year over year. Nscale reported more than $100 million. CoreWeave did $5.13 billion for all of 2025 and has guided to a range of $12.4 billion to $13.2 billion for 2026. Similar headline figures, on revenue bases that are nowhere near each other.
| Company | Contracted revenue or backlog | Q2 2026 revenue | 2026 revenue outlook |
|---|
| Nscale (private) | About $103B, per The Information | More than $100M | None given |
| CoreWeave (CRWV) | $104B at June 30, plus $25B signed in Q3 | $2.6B | $12.4B to $13.2B |
That doesn't make Nscale a bad company, and I'm not calling the deal fake. It makes $103 billion a different sort of number than the one CoreWeave files, and right now both are being quoted in the same units.
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What the prospectus should clarify
Nscale is working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on a listing that could come as soon as this month and raise as much as $3 billion, according to Bloomberg. The backers include Nvidia, Microsoft (MSFT), OpenAI, Aker, Nokia (NOK), Fidelity, and Blue Owl. That roster is meaningful external validation, even if it doesn't validate the $103 billion figure.
The prospectus is what I'd wait for. It should provide audited financials and explain how Nscale defines contracted revenue, including recognition timing, cancellation rights, and other conditions. Until it files, the $103 billion is a number Nscale hasn't published itself.
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