A UK neocloud provider’s public filing has exposed how ByteDance secured thousands of Nvidia’s most advanced AI accelerators through a Norwegian data center, highlighting the porous state of US export controls. The disclosure arrived not in Nscale’s S-1 itself but in a supporting $105 million loan agreement with Macquarie, where a Singaporean ByteDance subsidiary named Spring (SG) Pte Ltd was identified as the source of $24 million of the company’s $33 million in 2025 revenue.
The revenue concentration
Spring’s contract granted access to 2,304 Nvidia B200 chips at Nscale’s Glomfjord facility in Norway. That single customer represented roughly 73 percent of annual revenue, a concentration the company now says will fall below 20 percent as larger deals with Microsoft and Anthropic scale. The Financial Times reported the arrangement was legal but exploited loopholes in Washington’s restrictions on Chinese access to cutting-edge AI hardware.
The Macquarie loan and Nvidia’s arrival
The Macquarie credit, alongside $35 million in equity, funded the GPU purchase that first drew Nvidia’s attention. A month after Nscale drew the loan’s first tranche, Jensen Huang committed more than $660 million to the company under an agreement that included future volume commitments. Nvidia has since raised those commitments to over $2 billion and added an $860 million guarantee on Nscale’s Texas data center lease.
The monitoring regime
Macquarie compelled Nscale to monitor Spring’s chip usage for “compute anomalies or suspicious configurations” that might violate export controls. A third party also conducted due diligence on both ByteDance and the Singapore subsidiary. The oversight regime underscores how lenders are pricing the regulatory risk of Chinese entities accessing controlled hardware through offshore intermediaries.
The loophole landscape
Chinese firms have rented advanced chips from foreign providers or used overseas subsidiaries to purchase them directly. Washington recently closed the direct-purchase route, and the Trump administration is targeting the rental channel. Whether those moves reach the Spring-Nscale contract remains unclear. Meanwhile, delays on gigawatt-scale US data center projects are pushing hyperscalers toward smaller facilities like Nscale’s, potentially expanding the very market the controls aim to restrict.