Nscale Says It Needs Additional Financing for 2027; Portugal Accounted for 52% of First-Half Revenue

Portugal

Nscale, the London-based AI infrastructure company, said in an amended IPO registration statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Nov. 12 that new purchase orders for graphics processors (GPUs) and networking equipment had significantly increased its near-term capital-expenditure commitments, some of which “cannot be contractually deferred, reduced or cancelled.” The company said it will therefore be required to obtain additional financing to meet its forecast obligations in 2027 and to carry out its business plan in the ordinary course. The amendment said the orders were placed under services agreements with Anthropic. Those agreements, signed Aug. 25, provide for aggregate payments of up to about $44.6 billion, subject to delivery and service-availability requirements, and require Nscale to use best efforts to obtain qualifying financing, within a specified period, for the GPU equipment and data-center infrastructure needed at the Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia.

In its original registration statement on Sept. 18, Nscale had said that, based on its then-current operating plan, existing cash and cash equivalents, together with amounts available under committed debt financings and upfront customer prepayments, were expected to be sufficient to fund operating expenses, capital expenditure and debt service for at least the next 12 months from the date the financial statements were issued. That sentence does not appear in the Nov. 12 amendment. The Financial Times reported the warning on Nov. 13.

For the six months ended June 30, 2026, Nscale reported revenue of $140.6 million, 52% of it from deployments in Portugal and 45% from Norway. Long-lived assets in Portugal — property and equipment and right-of-use assets — were carried at $1,477.8 million as of that date. The company said the increase in revenue came mainly from new GPU deployments brought into service for customers at sites in Portugal and Norway in the first half of the year.

Nvidia is a minority shareholder in Nscale and the main manufacturer of the GPUs used in its infrastructure. The company is deploying Nvidia chips for Microsoft at the SINES Data Campus in Sines, Portugal. The filing said more than 12,600 Nvidia Grace Blackwell Ultra GPUs had already been deployed for Microsoft in the campus’s first building. A facilities table lists one active 30-megawatt colocation site in Portugal. On April 24, 2026, Nscale acquired a 200-megawatt project known as SIN02 at the same campus, to expand its European data-center footprint with a company-owned hyperscale site and to extend its work with Microsoft. Deployment of more than 66,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs is scheduled to start in late 2027. SIN02 is listed as an owned site that is under development and covered by a signed customer contract.

One passage in the filing puts the cash consideration for SIN02 at about $517.1 million, of which about $75.9 million was paid at closing, with substantially all of the remainder due in the second half of 2026. The notes to the financial statements record total consideration of €469.3 million, or $548.1 million at the transaction-date exchange rate. As of June 30, €377.8 million, or $430.7 million, remained outstanding and was recorded in current and long-term liabilities.

On data-center debt financing, the amendment said that, in addition to a commitment of up to $790 million already secured for the Kvandal South project in Norway, Nscale’s banking partners had committed a further $2.09 billion — subject to certain conditions to be completed by the company — to fund the development of a further 300 megawatts of owned and operated data centers at SIN02 in Portugal and Kvandal North in Norway. A related underwriting disclosure said an affiliate of Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC will act as arranger and underwriter for financing of the SIN02 project in Sines.

The amendment also said that between September 2025 and April 2026, Nscale entered into statements of work with Microsoft providing for payments of up to about $43.8 billion through December 2033, excluding optional extensions and subject to delivery and service-availability requirements. A single statement of work valued at $3.22 billion was later terminated. The company said the termination followed a decision by the local power provider at its data-center site in Loughton, in the United Kingdom, to withdraw the scheduled connection date and the associated power allocation. Nscale said it remains committed to the Loughton project and to the U.K., is exploring alternative power sources for the site, and that its relationship with Microsoft remains “strong and long-term.” It said the “London-wide grid issue” has no impact on its other contracts. The BBC also reported Microsoft’s withdrawal on Oct. 18.

In its account of SIN02, the filing describes the April acquisition as a 200-megawatt powered land site at the SINES Data Campus, and records the principal asset as a 25-year surface right for the construction of a data-center building.

Reuters reported on Nov. 3 that Portugal’s environment and energy minister, Maria da Graça Carvalho, told a parliamentary hearing that data centers would be required to run on renewable energy, which operators may buy from utilities, and to use cooling that does not need fresh water or that does not compete with supplies for households and other economic activity. She said the projects would also face a “very rigorous” environmental review. The report said the planned 1.2-gigawatt Start Campus development in Sines, backed by Microsoft AI infrastructure investment, already has one of six planned buildings in operation, running on renewable energy and cooled with seawater. Carvalho said the government was finalizing a decree setting out the rules.