Nscale closes a $900m revolving credit facility to fund its data-centre build-out

Nscale has closed a $900m revolving credit facility, a standing pool of borrowing it will draw on to speed up its data-centre build-out across the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, the company said on Tuesday. The London firm, which raised $2bn in a Series C at a $14.6bn valuation in March, is now stacking debt almost as quickly as it has raised equity.

The facility was syndicated across a dozen banks, and that roster is arguably the real signal. J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, MUFG, RBC Capital Markets, Bank of America, Crédit Agricole CIB, Deutsche Bank, Mizuho, SMBC, TD Securities, and KeyBank all took part, the kind of syndicate usually assembled for an established borrower rather than a company founded two years ago.

A revolving credit facility functions much like a corporate overdraft, money a company can draw, repay, and draw again as needed. That flexibility is worth more to Nscale than a single lump sum, because the $790m it raised for its Narvik site in Norway showed how project-by-project its financing had been until now.

A revolver carries another advantage over a fresh equity round. It adds firepower without diluting existing shareholders, which matters for a company that has already sold sizeable stakes across three rounds inside 18 months.

The timing problem is acute for anyone building AI data centres. Committing to Nvidia chips, power contracts, and construction comes long before the revenue from renting that capacity out arrives, and a revolver is designed to bridge exactly that gap.

Nscale did not disclose the facility’s pricing, its tenor, or its maturity date, nor whether the borrowing is secured against its chips or property. Those terms usually determine how expensive the liquidity really is, and their absence leaves the true cost of the deal an open question.

“The closing of this revolving credit facility with key global investment banks reflects real institutional confidence in our platform, capital structure, and team,” said Josh Payne, Nscale’s chief executive and founder.

He added that the facility increased the company’s flexibility to build “at speed and at scale” for the technology firms that train and deploy the largest AI models.

The credit line sits on top of an unusually dense run of fundraising. Nscale closed a $1.1bn Series B and then the $2bn Series C, both billed as the largest of their kind in European history, alongside a $1.4bn delayed-draw term loan backed by its GPUs.

That run has turned a company barely two years old into one of the most heavily capitalised private firms of the AI cycle. Nscale began life as a crypto-mining operation before pivoting to AI compute, and its Series C drew in Nvidia, Dell, Lenovo, and the trading houses Citadel and Jane Street, several of the same names now underwriting Europe’s data-centre boom.

Where the money goes is no longer much of a mystery. Nscale has signed a 1.35GW letter of intent with Microsoft for a West Virginia campus and committed €695m to a Portugal site supplying Nvidia chips to Microsoft, commitments that run to hundreds of thousands of GPUs and demand exactly the sort of flexible cash a revolver provides.

Founded in 2024 by Payne, an Australian entrepreneur, Nscale describes itself as a full-stack AI cloud that bundles software, compute, and power into a single vertically integrated offering. It operates and colocates data centres across Europe, North America, and Asia, several of them sited next to cheap Nordic hydropower.

The company did not say how much of the $900m it has drawn so far, or what it will fund first. On the evidence of the past year, the harder question is not where the money will go, but how quickly Nscale can spend it.

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