Nscale Crashes the Big Leagues of Data Center Developers

A year ago, CoreWeave looked like AI’s riskiest play. Then last fall, Oracle stepped in front. More recently, Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank, no stranger to big bets, has borrowed its way to the top.

This week, though, a new company took the title as riskiest AI firm: Nscale, a company run by a former coal miner that appears to have been independent for about six months. It might hold that prize for a while. 

It’s been a busy 10 days for Nscale. My colleague Anissa Gardizy broke the news on Thursday that Nscale agreed to buy a company that is developing a data center complex that could become the largest in the U.S.

In the deal, which Nscale confirmed on Monday, the company plans to acquire American Intelligence & Power, which was developing the complex in West Virginia. Bear with me, this gets complicated, a defining characteristic of the AI build-out. 

AIP is only seven weeks old, having been created on Jan. 28. It is the result of a merger between investment firm 8090 Industries, which also invested in Nscale, and the company that had been developing the West Virginia site, Fidelis New Energy.

There’s more.

Last week, Nscale said it raised $2 billion at a $14.6 billion valuation and named the requisite bold-face names to its board: Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s former chief operating officer, and Nick Clegg, a former U.K. deputy prime minister and Meta’s former president of global affairs. It should surprise no one that Nvidia also has invested in Nscale, which said it had signed a letter of intent to provide 1.35 gigawatts of computing power to Microsoft. 

Assuming the AIP deal is completed, Nscale expects revenue to increase 20 times, from $1.5 billion this year to $30 billion in 2027, according to documents Goldman Sachs prepared for Nscale’s fundraising effort. 

Nscale is nothing if not ambitious. It is also developing data centers in Texas, Norway, the U.K. and Portugal. In West Virginia, it says it’ll have 2 GW of computing power online by the first half of 2028 and with roughly 8 GW planned by 2031.

Setting up 1 GW of Nvidia-powered servers costs upward of $50 billion, so 8 GW would require hundreds of billions of dollars. That doesn’t include the electricity for the project, which will be entirely produced on site using roughly 1,000 natural gas-powered generators from Caterpillar. 

Nscale believes it can hit its audacious goals. The company is led by Josh Payne, who mined coal and later crypto before turning to data centers. And Payne has a team that has built data centers before. 

“We have the experience and the recipe to scale,” said Nidhi Chappell, the company’s president of AI infrastructure, who is Microsoft’s former head of AI infrastructure. Nscale is building on three years of development at the site done by Fidelis and will benefit from alliances with Nvidia and Dell.

It helps that Nscale is developing a data center in West Virginia. Unlike other states that have been pushing back on such facilities, West Virginia is eager to have them. Last year the state passed a law that put giant data centers in their own regulatory districts, which are controlled by the state, effectively blocking all local objections to the projects. The bill signing was in Point Pleasant, W.Va., where the Nscale data center is located. The legislation modified an existing law that required renewable energy in these districts.

Some people living near the Nscale site have complained about potential noise, air and light pollution. Across the street, a factory is about to break ground that will turn coal into fertilizer and other products. Across the Ohio River sits a big coal-fired power plant. 

Jonathan Pinson, a delegate in the state legislature who lives about four miles from the data center, said the residents’ concerns are legitimate. “You better believe that I want to make sure my community is protected for my kids as well,” said Pinson, who has eight children ages 3-13.

It’s no surprise that West Virginia’s abundance of energy—mainly coal and natural gas—was also a draw. Nscale will tap two nearby natural gas pipelines for fuel, but the standard gear to generate the required power has yearslong wait lists. To get the power they need quickly, Nscale will use roughly 1,000 smaller Caterpillar generators that will be linked together to create a giant power plant. “They are small and fast to deploy and are already being used all over the world to power oil rigs, power plants, and also data centers,” said Stu Pann, a senior advisor at Nscale. Caterpillar declined to comment. 

If demand for AI computing power wasn’t off the charts right now, there would likely be no Nscale, and no 2,250-acre data center complex in West Virginia. Meta’s agreement this week to spend up to $27 billion over several years renting cloud from data center firm Nebius is another example. 

Nscale backer 8090 Industries has told prospective investors in Nscale that it could go public by September, joining Nebius and CoreWeave on their wild ride in the market. Others might follow soon after. 

If AI demand fads, it’ll mean trouble for Nscale, Nebius, CoreWeave, Fluidstack and other companies borrowing to buy chips that they will rent to AI developers. Maybe Nscale will be the first to fall. It’s hard to say, but once the first one goes, investors will flee the rest.