Josh Payne’s path to running an AI infrastructure company set to go public at a targeted $30 billion valuation started underground, literally. Payne dropped out of high school in industrial Australia and spent three years working as a coal miner, filling long underground shifts by reading entrepreneurship books rather than following any clear plan toward the tech industry he’d eventually enter.
From there, the path ran through self-taught web development, a protein supplement business, and a recruitment platform matching construction workers with jobs, before Payne found his way into infrastructure and energy markets. He founded Arkon Energy to mine Bitcoin using cheap hydroelectric power across Norway and the US, scaling it to 330 megawatts of capacity and $110 million raised by late 2023, experience that taught him how to source cheap electricity and build data centers quickly, skills that turned out to translate directly into the AI boom.
In early 2024, Payne moved to London and founded Nscale as an offshoot of Arkon, pivoting from crypto-mining infrastructure to AI data centers. The timing proved fortunate: Nscale now counts Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia among its clients, and the company is pushing ahead with an IPO targeting a $30 billion valuation, up sharply from its last private valuation of $14.6 billion.
Investors aren't uniformly convinced the number holds up. A cohort of prospective buyers has pushed back on the $30 billion target, arguing a valuation closer to $16 billion to $19 billion would be more realistic given operational slippage at the company and a broader market that has cooled on neocloud listings. The gap between what Nscale wants and what some investors are willing to pay is, for now, wide.
The operational concerns are concrete. Nscale says it has signed $103 billion worth of contracts, but as of August 2026 had delivered only 55 megawatts of actual computing power against contract demand that implies roughly 10 gigawatts of eventual capacity, a massive gap between bookings and delivered infrastructure. Recent safety violations and Microsoft's withdrawal from a UK data center project tied to Nscale have added to the skepticism.
Nscale isn't going into the IPO unbacked, though. The company raised $3.36 billion in pre-IPO convertible notes in September, led by Third Point, including a $1 billion commitment from Nvidia expected to fund in mid-November. Notably, the conversion terms on that funding are capped at a $30 billion valuation, meaning Nscale's own recent investors are implicitly betting the IPO target is achievable, even if the broader market remains unconvinced.
Payne is pressing ahead regardless of the pushback, treating the IPO as the next test of a track record built almost entirely outside conventional tech-industry credentials. For a founder who learned the business from underground coal shifts and crypto-mining rigs rather than an engineering degree, the skepticism around Nscale's valuation is, in a sense, a familiar position: betting that operational execution will eventually catch up to ambition, the same bet that's defined his career so far.
