Nscale's backlog has two names on it
The British data-centre developer has disclosed $103bn of contracts ahead of its New York listing. Microsoft and Anthropic account for 85 per cent of it, and $2.6bn is live.
American Public Power Association via UnsplashA backlog is a promise with a counterparty attached. Nscale has $103bn of promises, and most of the money comes from two counterparties.
The British data-centre developer, which is preparing to list in New York at a valuation of up to $35bn, disclosed in its IPO filing that Microsoft and Anthropic account for 85 per cent of its total contract value, Bloomberg reported. Microsoft has signed several agreements since late 2025, worth about $43.8bn through 2033. Anthropic signed a $44.6bn agreement in August for computing capacity at a planned facility in West Virginia.
Two other figures in the filing matter more than the headline. Only $2.6bn of the $103bn was active at the end of August, and Nscale has not yet secured financing for the Anthropic contract, according to Investing.com's account of the document. In the first half of 2026 the company reported revenue of $140.6m and a net loss of $1.02bn.
Read together, the numbers describe a company whose valuation depends on work it has not yet done, paid for with money it has not yet raised. Contracted value is not revenue. It turns into revenue only once the building is up, the power is connected and the chips are installed. Until then it is an option held by the customer, and the filing reportedly lets customers terminate if milestones are missed.
Customer concentration is not unusual in this business. Every large AI compute provider depends on a handful of buyers, because only a handful of buyers need capacity at this scale. What stands out here is how far the contracted value runs ahead of what has been built. The live portion is about 2.5 per cent of the total, so an investor buying at $35bn is buying mostly the other 97.5 per cent.
Nvidia is the other name that recurs. It is a major shareholder and Nscale's main chip supplier, and it took $1bn of a recent $3.1bn financing round in convertible notes and non-voting shares. That is a familiar pattern in this market: the supplier of the scarce input also funds the customer that buys it.
For Anthropic, the contract belongs to a strategy of buying capacity from every direction at once. Komposite reported on Friday that the labs are also hunting for 20 to 30 megawatt sites, because power that can be connected this year is scarcer than capital. A gigawatt-scale campus in West Virginia is the other end of that strategy, and it is the end that takes longest to deliver.
The listing will test how the market prices that gap. Public investors have already taken the view that the IPO window is open for a few very large names. Nscale is asking them to value a construction programme on the strength of two customers' signatures. The number to watch after listing is not the backlog. It is how quickly the $2.6bn grows, and whether the Anthropic financing closes on terms that leave the equity story intact.