Nscale chief executive Josh Payne. Credit: Nscale “A substantial portion of our revenue is driven by a limited number of our customers, and the loss of, or a significant reduction in, spend from one or a few of our top customers would adversely affect our business,” Nscale wrote in the prospectus for its New York listing. The prospectus, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 18 September, does not name that customer. On Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that in 2025 it was ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok.
According to the FT, a ByteDance subsidiary in Singapore, Spring (SG) Pte. Ltd., brought in nearly three quarters of the UK AI cloud company’s sales last year. It used Nscale’s data centre in Norway to reach Nvidia chips it could not buy in China. What the filings show Nscale’s prospectus reports revenue of $33.0m for 2025 and $140.6m for the first half of 2026.
It also reports a net loss of $1.02bn for those six months. Spring appears in a supporting document instead. An exhibit to Nscale’s draft registration statement, a $105m loan agreement with Macquarie Bank acting as agent, names a cloud services contract between Spring and an Nscale company. The loan finances 2,304 Nvidia B200 GPUs at Nscale’s data centre in Glomfjord, Norway.
It was first signed on 12 June 2025 and restated on 22 September 2025. Neither document mentions ByteDance. The link between Spring and ByteDance comes from the FT’s reporting. Tom’s Hardware, which followed the FT report, put Spring’s share at $24m of the $33m.
Fortune’s reading of the prospectus found that the largest customer still provided 52% of revenue in the first half of 2026. The filing does not name that customer either. Legal, but with conditions The FT reported that the arrangement is legal. US export controls bar shipments of the most advanced Nvidia chips to China.
They did not stop Chinese companies from renting them in data centres abroad. The paper said the deal still exposes Nscale to regulatory and reputational risk. The lender set conditions of its own. Tom’s Hardware reported that Macquarie required Nscale to monitor how Spring used the chips.
Nscale had to report “compute anomalies or suspicious configurations” that could breach US export controls. Nscale also had a third party carry out due diligence on ByteDance and on Spring. From one customer to Microsoft and Anthropic Nscale has since signed far larger contracts. Its deal with Anthropic is worth up to about $44.6bn, according to the prospectus.
Fortune put the Microsoft agreement at $43.8bn through December 2033. The filing lists $103.4bn of active and contracted total contract value as of 31 August. According to Tom’s Hardware, Nscale said those contracts would take Spring below 20% of its revenue. It expects the share to shrink further as it adds Western customers.
Nvidia is one of Nscale’s backers and took part in its pre-IPO financing. The FT has reported that the company is seeking a valuation of up to $35bn. The prospectus still leaves the offering size and price blank.
