Nvidia is in talks to put roughly $2 billion into Nscale, the two-year-old London AI cloud company that has contracted to buy about 194,000 of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPUs. Read that sentence twice. The chipmaker is preparing to help finance the purchase of its own chips, and it is doing so weeks before Nscale asks public markets in New York to underwrite the rest.
Bloomberg first reported the talks on September 4, and The Next Web detailed the structure the same day: up to $3.5 billion in total, of which as much as $1.5 billion would come as convertible notes led by Daniel Loeb’s Third Point, with Nvidia’s roughly $2 billion alongside it. Goldman Sachs is running the raise. The convertibles price at a double-digit discount to the eventual IPO, a discount that narrows as the valuation climbs and stops adjusting entirely at $30 billion. Deliberations are continuing, and both the size and the investor list could still change.
A $103 Billion Order Book, Built in Four Weeks
What makes the round remarkable is not the money but the velocity of the story it is attached to. Nscale is telling prospective investors its contracted business now totals about $103 billion. Four weeks earlier, that book was reported at $51 billion.
Almost the entire difference is one contract. On August 26, Anthropic agreed to pay Nscale roughly $45 billion over six years for computing power, taking about 460 megawatts at Nscale’s West Virginia development, which is expected to energize at the end of 2027. It runs on Vera Rubin silicon. Semafor reported that the same capacity was shopped elsewhere first, and that both Microsoft and Google passed, Microsoft during a review of its data center portfolio and Google after weighing its own capital spending.
A week later, on September 3, Nscale signed a multi-year deal with humanoid robotics company Figure covering up to 100,000 Nvidia GPUs on the Vera Rubin platform, with an initial commitment of $3.5 billion of compute and stated intent to scale past $6 billion. Deployment targets the second half of 2027 in Barstow, Texas. Nscale is also taking an equity stake in Figure and becoming its preferred compute provider.
“We’ve seen incredible growth with inference and agentic AI and Figure is pushing the boundaries of AI even further,” said Josh Payne, Nscale’s founder and CEO, announcing the partnership. Figure founder Brett Adcock framed the constraint plainly: “To bring humanoid robots to every home in the world, we are largely constrained by data and compute.”
Nvidia was in the release too. “Nscale and Figure have activated the robotics flywheel,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and CEO, describing models trained on Vera Rubin through Nscale’s cloud, validated in Isaac Sim, then deployed on Nvidia GPUs inside Figure’s robots. It is an unusually candid description of a closed loop, and Huang is not describing it as a risk.
Against that order book sit the actual financials. Nscale booked roughly $33 million of revenue across all of 2025. Its most recent quarter crossed $100 million. The company is telling investors it could eventually generate about $18.1 billion in annual revenue with roughly $13.6 billion of adjusted EBITDA, figures it labels illustrative rather than guidance.
Why It Matters
Strip away the specifics and this is the defining financial structure of the 2026 AI build-out: the supplier capitalizing the customer.
Nvidia has run this play before. It invested directly in CoreWeave, which used the proceeds to buy Nvidia hardware, and layered on a backstop under which Nvidia agreed to lease unsold capacity itself through April 2032. Similar arrangements touch Nebius. Some neoclouds now pay Nvidia a share of cloud revenue as a return on financing, converting what used to be a one-time hardware sale into an annuity on the buyer’s income statement. Microsoft alone has roughly $60 billion in neocloud commitments across CoreWeave, Nebius and private players including Nscale.
Nvidia has stopped pretending nobody notices. On the company’s August 26 earnings call, CFO Colette Kress addressed it head-on: “We recognize the scale of this support, and we know some will call this circular financing. We see it differently.” Her defense rested on the quality of the counterparties, arguing that “these are once-in-a-generation companies” whose “technology leadership is proven, and their customer traction and usage are skyrocketing.” Huang has said he is delighted to invest in frontier labs, calling it a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
The bull case is straightforward and not obviously wrong: demand exceeds supply, financing is the binding constraint, and Nvidia is removing it. The bear case is that revenue quality degrades when a vendor funds its own demand, and that a $103 billion contracted book means little if the counterparties behind it are themselves financed by the same handful of balance sheets.
Nscale complicates the picture further by being a European asset with an American listing. Its Narvik site in northern Norway drew $790 million of committed debt from ABN AMRO, DNB, Nordea, SEB and Eksfin, Norway’s state export credit agency, with Microsoft as the anchor customer. A company written into UK sovereign AI plans and part-funded by a Nordic state lender intends to sell its shares in New York. Its board includes Sheryl Sandberg and former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.
What to Watch
Three things. Whether Nvidia’s participation is confirmed at $2 billion or trimmed, and whether it arrives as equity or something closer to a backstop. Whether Nscale’s S-1 discloses the terms of Nvidia’s stake and any revenue-share or offtake obligations flowing back to Santa Clara, which is where the circularity becomes measurable rather than rhetorical. And whether the $30 billion valuation cap holds when public investors see $33 million of 2025 revenue next to an $18.1 billion illustrative projection.
The West Virginia and Barstow sites do not energize until late 2027. Nscale is asking the market to fund about eighteen months of construction on the strength of contracts whose largest signatories are, increasingly, funded by the same ecosystem buying the shares.
“We recognize the scale of this support, and we know some will call this circular financing. We see it differently.”— Colette Kress, Chief Financial Officer, Nvidia