FT: ByteDance accounted for 73% of Nscale's 2025 sales before US IPO

Nscale's main pitch to investors ahead of its US listing did not prominently disclose that ByteDance accounted for nearly three-quarters of its sales last year, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. The link between the London-based AI cloud provider and the Chinese owner of TikTok emerges from documents filed alongside the initial public offering paperwork rather than from the narrative presented to investors.

What the filings show

Nscale's SEC filings state that a single customer generated 73 per cent of the company's $33mn revenue in 2025. A loan agreement filed as an exhibit identifies that customer as Spring (SG) Pte Ltd, a Singapore entity that people close to the company say is a ByteDance subsidiary. Nscale declined to comment.

The same documents describe a contract signed in May 2025 for 2,304 Nvidia B200 chips at Nscale's data centre in Glomfjord, Norway. The agreement helped underpin a $105mn loan from Macquarie, alongside $35mn in equity, to finance the chip purchase. The first tranche was drawn in August 2025.

Why Norway matters

ByteDance used the Norwegian facility to reach Nvidia chips it would otherwise have been unable to buy in China, the FT reported, a route that sits outside US export controls aimed at direct chip sales. Nscale warns in its risk factors that tighter restrictions on Chinese entities' cloud access to Nvidia chips could limit its ability to serve key customers, and that such dealings may be seen as a reputational risk. Macquarie required monitoring of chip usage for possible export-control breaches, and people familiar with the matter said Nscale ran third-party due diligence on ByteDance and Spring. Macquarie declined to comment; ByteDance and Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment.

A widening customer base

Nscale has since signed far larger multiyear computing agreements, worth up to $44bn with Microsoft and $45bn with Anthropic, and says revenue from its largest customer will fall below 20 per cent this year. The company, in which Nvidia is both investor and supplier, filed for a New York Stock Exchange listing under the ticker NSCL on September 18, targeting a valuation of up to $35bn. It reported $140.6mn in revenue and a $1.02bn net loss for the first half of 2026.