At a glance
Nscale, the London AI cloud company founded by Newcastle-born Josh Payne, filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange on 18 September 2026, three weeks after TIME named him among the 100 most influential people in AI.
Payne, 32, skipped university, spent three years in Hunter Valley coal mines and directed cranes at Barangaroo before co-founding a labour-hire firm in 2017.
A two-week trip to Norway in 2022 led him to a hydro-powered bitcoin mine, the site Nscale grew out of in May 2024.
NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg are now backers or board members, and Anthropic has signed for up to US$44.6 billion of computing.
Reuters reported a target valuation of about US$30 billion, and Nscale's board has granted Payne an award worth about US$350 million.
Nscale filed on 18 September 2026 to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NSCL, two years and four months after it launched. The London AI cloud company holds US$103.4 billion of customer contracts and was reported by Reuters to be seeking a valuation of about US$30 billion. The man who founded it, Josh Payne, is 32, grew up in Newcastle, New South Wales, and in August 2026 was named by TIME among the 100 most influential people in AI.
Payne never went to university, and his route to Wall Street ran through the Hunter Valley coal mines, a Sydney building site, a Melbourne bitcoin miner and a two-week trip to Norway. Along the way he won NVIDIA as an investor and Microsoft and Anthropic as customers.
Payne read business books during downtime in the Hunter Valley mines
Payne was born in Newcastle in 1993 and, like many from the region, skipped university and went to work in the Hunter Valley's coal mines, the Australian Financial Review reported in March 2026. He spent three years in the mines, the New York Times reported, and told the paper his interest in business began with books such as The 4-Hour Work Week, which he read during downtime at the mine. He also built websites selling protein supplements and electronics.
From the mines he moved into construction, where one of his jobs was directing crane operators on the Barangaroo development in Sydney. In 2017 he co-founded a labour-hire firm for the mining industry, and two years later he was running PT Capital, which advised clients on renewable energy. It was while working for investors financing Australian renewable energy projects, he told the New York Times, that he became fascinated by data centres, because they could use electricity that would otherwise go to waste.
One colleague has described Payne's feel for a deal as a "self-taught MBA", the AFR reported. Nick O'Loughlin, a former colleague, told the Sunday Times he was "the ultimate salesman" who "would speak to absolutely anyone".
Two weeks in Norway led Payne to a bitcoin mine
In 2019 Payne set up Arkon Energy, a Melbourne-based bitcoin miner, with business partner Nathan Townsend, the AFR reported. He had learned that hydropower in northern Norway cost about 3 US cents a kilowatt-hour, against a European average of about 20 cents, so in 2022 he booked flights from Sydney to Oslo that took more than 24 hours.
"I stayed for two weeks, and I left with a letter of intent to acquire a project, which at the time was a Bitcoin mine," he told the New York Times.
The mine was in Glomfjord, a town of about 1,000 people just above the Arctic Circle that runs on a century-old hydro plant at the end of the fjord. Arkon bought it in November 2022, High North News reported, and a year later raised US$110 million, setting aside US$30 million to turn the site into an AI cloud.
That AI cloud became Nscale, which Payne and Townsend spun out of Arkon in May 2024, by which time Payne had moved to London. In the founder's letter of Nscale's prospectus, he writes that he set out in August 2023 with a plan to own every layer of the business, from the land and power to the chips and the software. Glomfjord still runs as an Nscale data centre, with the heat from its computers piped to a local fish farm.
Jensen Huang signed "Zero to 50 billion" on a box of Johnnie Walker
In September 2025, during Donald Trump's state visit to Britain, NVIDIA announced a £500 million investment in Nscale. Chief executive Jensen Huang told reporters in London, "We convinced ourselves that Nscale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the U.K.," CNBC reported.
Rather than sign a contract to mark the partnership, Huang autographed the box of a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label for Payne with the words "Zero to 50 billion", his forecast of Nscale's revenue over six years, the AFR reported. "He was surprised to hear I came from the coal mines," Payne told the New York Times. NVIDIA has since become the largest single source of Nscale's pre-listing money, part of the financing it has lined up for its own customers.
Øyvind Eriksen, chief executive of Norwegian industrial group Aker, told the New York Times he met Payne in 2025 after Payne contacted him on LinkedIn. The two agreed to build data centres in Norway, and Eriksen joined Nscale's board. Former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who joined the board in early 2026 alongside former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, told the paper Payne's vision and youthful ambition reminded her of her former boss, Mark Zuckerberg.
"The largest businesses on earth in the next five years are going to be AI-native," Payne told TIME for its AI list. "And I very much intend to be one of them."
Anthropic signs for up to US$44.6bn at Nscale's West Virginia campus
Nscale's contracts have grown from US$100 million to more than US$103 billion in two and a half years, and its staff from 40 to more than 1,000, according to the prospectus. Anthropic signed on 25 August 2026 for up to about US$44.6 billion of computing at Nscale's 2,250-acre campus in West Virginia. The site is planned to reach 2GW of power by the first half of 2028.
Microsoft, which the New York Times described in March as Nscale's biggest customer, is due to take more than 66,000 NVIDIA chips at a campus Nscale bought in Portugal. Nscale has also agreed to buy Anyscale, a US software company whose open-source Ray tools spread AI work across large numbers of chips, and it opened an Asian headquarters in Singapore in October 2025.
The listing would put Payne among a small group of Australian founders with AI cloud companies on American exchanges. Brothers Daniel and William Roberts started IREN in Sydney as a bitcoin miner and listed it on Nasdaq. Sharon AI, which rents out chips from inside NEXTDC's Melbourne and Sydney data centres, also trades there.
At home, Oliver Curtis and Tim Rosenfield of Firmus, which builds AI data centres in Australia and Asia, were ranked on the AFR's 2026 technology power list on 22 September. Firmus is seeking to raise A$7 billion in an ASX float scheduled for 22 October 2026, so investors in neocloud providers in Australia may soon have Nscale's New York price to compare against.
On 31 July 2026 Nscale's board granted Payne performance share units worth about US$350 million, about 2.5% of the company. They become eligible to vest only after the listing, subject to performance targets running through 2032. Nscale was valued at US$14.6 billion in March 2026, so a float near the reported US$30 billion would double that in six months.
What to watch
The price range. Nscale's next filing will set how many shares it sells and at what price, turning the reported US$30 billion target into a number investors can bid on.
Payne's stake. The same filing will fill in the ownership table, showing how much of Nscale Payne holds through the Jersey trust that owns his shares.
Firmus's prospectus. Due on 8 October 2026, it will give Australian investors a local AI cloud company to set against Nscale's New York price.