British artificial intelligence cloud provider Nscale is considering delaying its planned $35 billion stock market listing until next year, a fresh sign that investors are growing warier about the economics of the AI infrastructure boom.
The Telegraph reported on Tuesday that executives at the Nvidia-backed data-centre developer are assessing whether to pause efforts to go public until 2027. Reuters, which cited the Telegraph report, said it could not immediately verify the account, and Nscale declined to comment.
Nscale filed for an initial public offering in September and had planned to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL. The listing was set to be one of the largest tests yet of investor appetite for the so-called neoclouds — the specialist cloud providers racing to rent out Nvidia chips to AI companies.
A valuation under pressure
The possible delay comes as the numbers behind Nscale's listing have come under strain. Barron's reported that the IPO could value the company at as much as $30 billion, while Bloomberg reported in October that investors were placing its value at between $16 billion and $19 billion — well below the $35 billion figure attached to the listing.
Nscale's preliminary prospectus, filed in September, said Microsoft would pay it up to $43.8 billion through 2033, subject to delivery and availability requirements. But the company's own filing showed a net loss of £755 million ($1.2 billion) in the first half of 2026, even as revenue surged — a reminder that the neocloud model burns cash long before it turns a profit.
Nvidia, Nscale's most prominent backer, committed in September to invest $1 billion in the company, with funding expected by mid-November. Nscale has also disclosed deals to supply computing power to Anthropic, Microsoft and ByteDance.
Setbacks pile up
The listing delay would cap a difficult autumn for Nscale. In October, Microsoft pulled out of a deal to become the anchor tenant at the company's first UK data centre in Loughton, Essex, where it had agreed to rent 23,000 of Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips. Grid officials have told Nscale the site may not receive power until the 2030s.
Earlier this month, Microsoft also turned down a multibillion-dollar expansion of its AI deal with Nscale in Texas. The company is facing delays at a major data-centre project in Glomfjord, Norway, where only a fraction of the planned 30 megawatts of capacity is operational. At the end of August, Nscale reported just 7 megawatts of active computing capacity across its own data centres.
A wider chill over AI spending
The report lands at a moment of broader doubt about AI infrastructure spending. Anthropic, the AI company at the centre of the largest IPO of the year, has seen its valuation in its latest filing shrink from the $2 trillion figure once floated on Wall Street, according to Barron's. US tech stocks fell on Tuesday after hotter-than-expected October inflation data revived worries about interest rates.
For now, Nscale's listing remains uncertain rather than cancelled. But if the company does wait until 2027, it would join a growing list of AI infrastructure bets being repriced — or postponed — as investors demand proof that the enormous spending on chips and data centres can generate sustainable returns.
