Nscale’s unnamed 2025 anchor customer was ByteDance—and the contract routed scarce Nvidia chips through Norway

ByteDance, through a Singapore subsidiary called Spring, generated about $24mn of Nscale’s $33mn revenue in 2025, according to the Financial Times and company filings. The contract provided access to 2,304 Nvidia B200 chips at Nscale’s Glomfjord data centre in Norway. Nscale’s prospectus described the customer concentration without prominently identifying the Chinese technology group behind it.

The omission matters because the transaction sits directly on a policy boundary. US export controls are intended to restrict Chinese access to advanced accelerators, including through offshore arrangements. A British cloud company, a Singapore entity and a Norwegian facility can comply with the literal structure of a contract while still raising the strategic question the controls were designed to address: who ultimately receives the compute. The reporting does not establish that Nscale or ByteDance broke the law.

It also changes how investors should read Nscale’s growth. The company now presents more than $103bn of contracted value and first-half 2026 revenue of $140.6mn, but its original commercial base was unusually concentrated in one politically sensitive customer. Future revenue is expected to shift toward Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI, which reduces dependence only if enormous facilities are financed, built and energized on schedule.

Nscale’s IPO asks public investors to underwrite both construction execution and the durability of demand. The ByteDance relationship adds a third layer: contracts can be commercially valuable yet become harder to renew, disclose or finance when export-control policy catches up with the route by which customers obtain computing power.