Nscale Limited, the London-headquartered AI-infrastructure company whose capital table runs through Oslo, filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 18 September 2026 for a proposed initial public offering. It intends to list its ordinary shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NSCL; the price range and the number of shares are left blank in this first version of the prospectus. Aker ASA, the Norwegian industrial holding company controlled by Kjell Inge Røkke, announced the filing to the Oslo market at 22:02 that evening, describing Nscale as its “second largest portfolio holding”.
For the Portugal–Scandinavia corridor the document matters less for the offering than for what it discloses. Until now, the Sines story has been told through interviews and press releases. The S-1 is the first audited account of what Portugal means to Nscale, and the answer is: more than any other country. In the six months to 30 June 2026 the company booked $140.6 million of revenue, of which $73.0 million came from Portugal, $63.7 million from Norway and $3.9 million from the United Kingdom. A year earlier Portuguese revenue was zero and total revenue was $10.4 million, all of it Norwegian. The filing’s own risk-factor language puts it plainly: “for the six months ended June 30, 2026, 52% and 45% of our revenue was derived from deployments in Portugal and Norway, respectively.”
From $234 million to $1.48 billion in six months
The balance sheet tells the same story in larger numbers. Nscale’s long-lived assets, meaning property, equipment and right-of-use assets, stood at $8.38 billion at 30 June 2026, up from $3.03 billion at the end of 2025. Portugal accounts for $1,477.8 million of that, up from $233.9 million six months earlier, behind only the United States ($3,485.7 million) and Norway ($1,573.8 million) and ahead of Iceland ($964.3 million) and the United Kingdom ($870.1 million). Portugal did not appear in the geographic table at all at the end of 2024.
Most of the jump is the second Sines building. On 24 April 2026 Nscale completed the acquisition of SIN02, described in the prospectus as “a 200 MW powered land site at the SINES Data Campus in Portugal”, for total consideration of €469.3 million ($548.1 million at the transaction date). Only a first instalment has been paid: €377.8 million ($430.7 million at 30 June) was still outstanding at the half-year and, in the words of the financial-statement notes, “substantially all of the remainder will be paid in the second half of 2026”. The company accounts for the deal as an asset acquisition because nearly all of the value sits in a single intangible asset, the surface right on the parcel of land granted to SIN02 for the construction of a data-centre building. The developer of the campus, Start Campus, is not named in the filing, which refers throughout to the “SINES Data Campus”.
| Nscale in Portugal, per the S-1 | Figure | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue from Portugal, H1 2026 | $73.0M of $140.6M (52%); H1 2025: nil | Geographic revenue note, condensed accounts |
| Long-lived assets in Portugal | $1,477.8M at 30 Jun 2026; $233.9M at 31 Dec 2025 | Geographic long-lived-assets note |
| SIN02 acquisition | 24 Apr 2026; 200 MW; €469.3M ($548.1M); €377.8M outstanding at 30 Jun, payable H2 2026 | Business overview; Note on acquisitions |
| Portuguese sites in facilities table | Colocation, 30 IT MW, Tier 3, active; Owned, 200 IT MW, Tier 3, contracted | Facilities table, as of 31 Aug 2026 |
| Microsoft deployments at Sines | >12,600 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Ultra GPUs at the first building; >66,000 Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs at SIN02 from late 2027 | Prospectus summary |
| Portuguese subsidiaries | Nscale Services Portugal, Unipessoal Lda (I, II and III); Caminho Prioritário, S.A.; Luxembourg and Dutch holding chain | Exhibit 21.1 |
| Group totals | ~25,000 active GPUs; 461,000 active and contracted; 1.37 GW active and contracted capacity; 5 active and 12 contracted sites; >1,000 employees | Prospectus summary, as of 31 Aug 2026 |
What Sines is being built for
The customer behind the Portuguese revenue is not named in the geographic note, but the prospectus leaves little to infer. Between September 2025 and April 2026 Nscale entered into statements of work with Microsoft that “provide for payments to us of up to approximately $43.8 billion through December 2033”, excluding optional extensions and subject to delivery and availability requirements. The Sines programme is described as two steps within that relationship: the deployment of more than 12,600 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Ultra GPUs “at the first building of the SINES Data Campus for Microsoft”, which is the 30 MW colocation site listed as active in the facilities table, and the expansion “through the deployment of over 66,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs starting in late 2027” at the owned 200 MW SIN02. Nscale’s largest customer accounted for 52 percent of first-half revenue; the customer that represented 73 percent of 2025 revenue, under a series of GPU-services agreements signed from November 2024, is expected to fall below 20 percent this year.
Two later contracts show how quickly the order book has outgrown the Iberian footprint. On 25 August 2026 the company signed four Anthropic services agreements providing for aggregate payments of up to approximately $44.6 billion, again subject to delivery and service-availability conditions. And on 15 September, three days before the filing, it signed a subscription agreement for at least $3.1 billion of unsecured convertible loan notes, of which $1.0 billion is to be taken by NVIDIA in notes or non-voting shares in a transaction expected to close around 16 November. The notes convert automatically on completion of the IPO. Nscale also has a definitive agreement, signed on 28 July, to buy the AI-software company Anyscale for $1.65 billion in equity, with closing tied to the offering.
The Norwegian owner, spelled out
The S-1 is also the most precise public description yet of how Aker sits on Nscale’s cap table. The principal-shareholder table lists Aker DC Holding AS first among holders of 5 percent or more, ahead of Sandton Capital Partners and Paladin Capital, the Jersey trust vehicle of founder and chief executive Josh Payne; the percentages are blank pending the pricing amendment. A footnote traces the chain: Aker DC Holding is wholly owned by Aker Capital AS, which is wholly owned by Aker ASA, listed on Euronext Oslo Børs; Aker ASA is majority-owned by TRG Holding AS, in turn majority-owned by The Resource Group TRG AS, whose sole owner is Kjell Inge Røkke. The registered business address for all of them is Oksenøyveien 10, Lysaker.
The filing confirms the two transactions that built the position. In the September 2025 Series B round, entities affiliated with Aker subscribed for 45,012,600 Series B preferred shares for $284,989,774.80, the “USD 285 million” NorthSouth HQ reported at the time. Then, in March 2026 and in connection with the Series C round, Nscale bought out Aker’s 50 percent of the Aker Nscale Joint Venture, the Narvik data-centre partnership whose first customers were OpenAI and Microsoft, for $1.8 billion in shares: 60,198,900 Series B AIV shares plus warrants over a further 31,442,220. Aker’s president and chief executive, Øyvind Eriksen, has sat on Nscale’s board since October 2025, alongside Nick Clegg, Sheryl Sandberg, Fidji Simo and Susan Decker. The same March round brought in the Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia, a site the company says can scale to about 8 GW of gross power by 2031.
The cost of growing this fast
None of this is profitable yet, and the prospectus does not pretend otherwise. Nscale lost $1,020.1 million in the first half of 2026, against $368.9 million a year earlier; the operating loss was $492.0 million and a further $457.1 million came from fair-value adjustments on financing instruments. Full-year 2025 revenue was $33.0 million, almost all Norwegian, and the net loss was $761.8 million. The Portuguese figures should be read in that light: $73 million of half-year revenue is the first income from a campus whose second phase alone carries a €469 million land bill, a 2027 delivery date and a GPU generation that does not yet ship.
The risk factors now name Portugal explicitly. The company’s data centres are “strategically located in low-cost power markets, including in Norway, Portugal, Iceland, and the United States”, and expansions “are currently underway, or being contemplated” in, among others, Norway, Iceland and Portugal; delays, component availability and the concentration of revenue in a handful of customers and countries are all flagged. The corporate structure has been built for that expansion: the exhibit listing subsidiaries includes three operating companies, Nscale Services Portugal, Unipessoal Lda, II and III, a Portuguese S.A. named Caminho Prioritário, Dutch and Luxembourg holding companies dedicated to Portugal, and a UK-registered Nscale Ventures Holdings Portugal Limited.
Why this matters for the corridor
A Norwegian-controlled shareholder, a London company and a Portuguese campus are about to be priced by New York. Whatever valuation the amended filing eventually carries, the S-1 already establishes three facts that Portuguese suppliers, Nordic investors and the government in Lisbon can work with. First, Sines is not a side project: it is the largest single source of revenue and the third-largest asset base of a company that has just contracted roughly $88 billion of potential customer payments. Second, the money is real and still moving: about €378 million of the SIN02 price is due to be paid in Portugal before the end of the year, before construction spending on a 200 MW building that will need Portuguese electrical, mechanical and civil contractors through 2027. Third, the ownership is Nordic in a way that will be visible in every quarterly report: Aker’s stake, Røkke’s control chain and Eriksen’s board seat are now SEC-registered facts, and the Narvik and Sines campuses sit inside the same audited entity. For readers of NorthSouth HQ’s earlier reporting on the Narvik–Sines axis and on Start Campus’s EDP power pact, the filing is the document that turns a corridor thesis into a set of numbers. Nscale’s Portuguese operation is profiled in the NorthSouth HQ company directory.