Nscale IPO Filing Omits ByteDance Even as TikTok Owner Rented Banned Nvidia Chips in Norway

Nscale, a British cloud startup backed by Nvidia, filed to go public in the United States and left its single biggest customer out of the main prospectus. That customer is ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok.

ByteDance moved through Nscale's books under a Singapore subsidiary called Spring, and Spring drove about 73 percent of Nscale's 2025 revenue, roughly $33 million of it. Tom's Hardware reported that the S-1 keeps the ByteDance link in an appendix rather than naming it in the body, where investors would expect to see a concentration risk that large.

The arrangement matters because of where the compute physically sits. In May 2025, Spring agreed to run 2,304 Nvidia B200 chips at a former crypto-mining site in Glomfjord, Norway. That single contract backed a $105 million loan from Macquarie plus about $35 million in equity for the hardware.

Those B200s are exactly the kind of advanced accelerator ByteDance cannot legally import into China under US export rules. Renting them inside a Norwegian data center is a way around that wall, and under the current rules it is legal. It also hands a US listing candidate a legal and reputational question it now has to carry in public.

Nscale tells investors the concentration will not last. It expects its largest customer to fall below 20 percent of revenue this year as contracts with Microsoft and Anthropic scale up.

The setup echoes a broader worry Washington has flagged about Chinese firms reaching US AI capability through indirect routes, a theme in CISA's warning on China and AI distillation. Nvidia itself has been reworking how it shares in neocloud economics, pausing an AI cloud revenue-share arrangement earlier this cycle.

Fortune framed the listing around a $35 billion valuation. The IPO has not priced, and there is no Commerce Department action against the Norway routing. What exists today is a filing that keeps its largest customer off the headline pages.