Microsoft has turned down an option to more than double the computing power it rents from Nscale at a data center in Barstow, Texas, the Financial Times reported. The extra capacity could have been worth tens of billions of dollars to the London-based AI cloud company, the FT said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Is Microsoft Still Buying Compute From Nscale in Texas?

The option was part of a deal the two companies signed in October 2025. Under that agreement, Nscale agreed to supply Microsoft with about 200,000 Nvidia GB300 chips, the processors used to train and run AI models, across sites in the United States and Europe. Texas was the largest piece. Nscale leases a 240-megawatt campus in Barstow from bitcoin miner Ionic Digital, and it is due to deliver about 104,000 chips to Microsoft there starting in the third quarter of 2026.

Why Did Microsoft Decline the Nscale Texas Expansion?

When the deal was announced, Nscale said Microsoft also held an option on a second, 700-megawatt phase at the site beginning in late 2027. That is the expansion Microsoft has now declined. The existing Texas contract stays in place. A person familiar with the matter told the FT that Microsoft made the decision months before Nscale filed for its initial public offering in September.

How Does the Loughton Setback Affect Nscale?

The decision follows another setback for the partnership. In October, Microsoft pulled out of a deal to anchor Nscale’s site in Loughton, Essex, which was billed as the UK’s largest AI data center. Grid delays had pushed its power supply into the 2030s.

Nscale, which counts Nvidia among its backers, is asking investors to value it at up to $35 billion in its New York listing. Before filing, the company closed a $3.36 billion pre-IPO funding round and pitched a large backlog of contracted future revenue.

Aker, the Norwegian group that owns about 23 percent of Nscale, has played down the UK loss. “That was one, relatively speaking, minor contract in a bigger portfolio,” Aker chief executive Øyvind Eriksen said of the Essex deal.

Nscale is also in talks with Anthropic. Last month, the two companies were negotiating a computing deal worth about $45 billion, according to the report.

Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
News Factory APP - noticias agénticas para impulsar tu SEO y AEO.