Nscale is preparing a $35 billion initial public offering while its prospectus makes no mention of the customer that supplied nearly three-quarters of last year’s revenue. ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, accounted for 73 percent of Nscale’s 2025 sales, a figure that appears only in a loan exhibit filed months earlier. The omission frames a listing that is less a diversified cloud play than a structured vehicle for Chinese access to Nvidia silicon.
The revenue is real the disclosure is not
The S-1 shows $33 million of revenue for all of 2025 and $140.6 million for the first half of 2026. In the later period the top customer’s share fell to 52 percent, but the identity of that customer is redacted from the public filing. A September 2025 draft registration statement, filed to support a Macquarie loan secured against Nscale’s contracts, names the counterparty as Spring (SG) Pte. Ltd., a Singapore entity with a registered office at 1 Raffles Quay. Spring is a ByteDance subsidiary. The Financial Times reported that ByteDance routed workloads through Nscale’s Norway data center to obtain Nvidia chips it cannot legally purchase in China.
The loophole is legal the risk is not priced
The arrangement exploits a gap in U.S. export controls: Nvidia chips sold to a Norwegian operator, leased to a Singapore entity, used by a Chinese parent. Nscale’s own filing warns that concentration among a few customers could “adversely affect” its business, but it does not flag the specific regulatory exposure of its largest relationship. The S-1 also discloses $56.4 billion of remaining performance obligations and $103 billion of total contract value, figures that dwarf the revenue base and imply a backlog priced on the assumption that the ByteDance flow continues uninterrupted.
New anchors arrive with long dated paper
Since the Macquarie filing Nscale has signed two headline agreements: $43.8 billion with Microsoft through December 2033 and $44.6 billion with Anthropic over an unspecified term. Both are framed as diversification. Neither discloses cash-versus-credit terms, break fees, or take-or-pay minimums. Until those details appear, the contracts function more as marketing collateral than as evidence of a de-risked revenue base.
The structure tells the story
A $35 billion valuation on $173 million of trailing revenue implies a multiple that only makes sense if the ByteDance contract is perpetual and the regulatory overhang is zero. The prospectus treats the concentration risk as generic boilerplate while the loan exhibit treats the ByteDance contract as collateral. One of those documents is priced for investors. The other is priced for lenders. The gap between them is where the deal lives.