Nscale vs Firmus: How to Read a Neocloud IPO ($103 Billion Backlog, $1.02 Billion Loss and a Downsized Offering)

Two Nvidia-backed neoclouds are going public with the same pitch — decades-long GPU contracts — and this week the market answered them differently: Nscale filed an S-1 showing a US$1.02 billion loss in six months, and Firmus had to cut its offering.

What Nscale's S-1 Revealed

On September 18, 2026, Nscale filed its S-1 with the SEC to list on the NYSE under the ticker NSCL. The global coordinators are Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley. The first-half 2026 numbers show the classic pattern of a neocloud in build-out mode: revenue multiplying, losses growing even faster.

The number that jumps out is the gap between US$103.4 billion in backlog and only about US$2.6 billion in active contracts: the rest depends on securing financing and actually building the data centers. The Register also notes that Nscale warns in its prospectus that it has no binding financing commitments to fulfill the Anthropic agreements. At up to US$44.6 billion, a single customer accounts for roughly 43-44% of the backlog.

Firmus: The Same Bet in a Different Market

In Australia, Firmus (backed by Nvidia, with a US$10 billion debt facility led by Blackstone) is aiming to debut on the ASX under the code AIF around October 23. Its original plan: shares at A$11, a market capitalization of A$43.7 billion, and an offering of around US$5 billion, with more than 60% earmarked for servers and deployment. Its flagship project, Southgate, in Tasmania, plans for about 36,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs and a first stage of 90 MW. Firmus expects a loss of A$77 million in the first half of its fiscal year.

Nscale vs Firmus: How to Read a Neocloud Before Buying Compute From It

Both companies share the same model: raise debt and equity against long-term contracts with a handful of AI customers, build data centers with Nvidia GPUs, and lease out the capacity. The differences matter if you depend on them:

A useful rule of thumb: contracted backlog is not revenue. To evaluate a compute provider, separate active contracts from conditional ones, look at concentration in a single customer, and check how much of the financing is binding.