The Nightly Build.
News Brief

Nscale's IPO Filing Shows Revenue Up 1,252% and Losses Above $1 Billion

The same day, NASA locked SpaceX into three more crewed flights to the space station, running through 2030.

3 min read2026-09-19
Space

NASA Locks SpaceX Into Three More Crewed Flights Through 20301

NASA's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract modification with SpaceX covers Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17. The modification is worth $946 million, with mission readiness set for 2027 and 2028. That lifts the total CCtCap contract value with SpaceX to $5.92 billion.1 NASA's own notice of intent in May had signaled up to six further missions beyond that baseline. This modification locks in three of them, leaving three that could still go to Boeing if its Starliner capsule is certified.2 SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said this week that the company "is not retiring Crew Dragon today, for sure," without committing to fly it past 2030.2

AI Cloud

Nscale's S-1 Puts Its Backlog at $56.4 Billion, With an Anthropic Deal Capped at $44.6 Billion3

Nscale, an Nvidia-backed AI cloud and GPU-rental provider, filed to list on the NYSE under the ticker NSCL.3 The filing reports revenue of $140.6 million for the first half of 2026, up 1,252% from $10.4 million a year earlier, alongside a net loss of $1,020.1 million against $368.9 million in the same period last year.3 Remaining performance obligations reached $56.4 billion as of June 30, 2026.3 A separate active-and-contracted order-book figure, dated two months later on August 31, put total contract value at $103.4 billion, including $2.6 billion already active.3 The filing also discloses an Anthropic Services Agreement, signed August 25, providing for payments of up to approximately $44.6 billion contingent on delivery and service-availability milestones for GPU capacity at a data campus in West Virginia.3 Nscale has not yet secured financing for its side of that build.3 A single customer accounted for 52% of first-half revenue.3 CNBC's own read of the filing puts Nscale's debt above $8 billion alongside an $860 million lease guarantee from Nvidia.4

Ad Tech

Infillion Acquires Foursquare, Folding Its Location Data Into Ad Targeting5

Infillion, an advertising-technology company, is acquiring Foursquare and folding its location-intelligence data, more than 100 million points of interest across 200 countries built from 16 billion human-verified check-ins, into its ad platform alongside the purchase data it already owns from Catalina.5 Foursquare will keep operating as its own brand inside Infillion's Data Business Unit once the deal closes.5 Infillion disclosed no purchase price and no closing date, and has not decided whether to open-source or find a new operator for Foursquare's consumer apps, Swarm and Superlocal.5 Foursquare's roughly 150 employees are joining Infillion's roughly 650, and Infillion founder Rob Emrich told Axios the deal should grow the combined company's revenue and headcount by 20% to 25%, a projection that does not appear in Infillion's own announcement.6

Energy

EQT-Backed Madison Targets a Second AI-Ready Gigawatt With a $2 Billion Battery Push7

Madison Energy Infrastructure, an EQT Infrastructure portfolio company, is launching a "Community Infrastructure" initiative to mobilize up to $2 billion toward 1 additional gigawatt of distributed battery storage by 2028, starting across the 13 states of the PJM Interconnection.7 That target is separate from Madison's existing project portfolio, which the company expects to itself cross 1 gigawatt by fall 2026.7 The new batteries, sized for four-hour discharge, will sit at existing industrial and commercial sites, including a partnership with data-center operator EdgeConneX, to free grid capacity that AI data centers can then draw on.7 Bloomberg's own interview with Madison CEO Richard Walsh independently confirmed the figures and framed the investment as a response to a data-center power bottleneck: new centralized generation and transmission cannot keep pace with data centers' build timelines.8 The $2 billion is a ceiling for a phased buildout through 2028, not a signed capital commitment.7

Sources

  1. NASA · Award announcement for SpaceX's Crew-15/16/17 contract modification
  2. Teslarati · Independent report on the NASA-SpaceX Crew Dragon contract
  3. U.S. SEC · Nscale Limited's Form S-1 registration statement
  4. CNBC · Report on Nscale's IPO filing
  5. Infillion · Announcement of the Foursquare acquisition
  6. Axios · Report on the Infillion-Foursquare deal
  7. Madison Energy Infrastructure · Announcement of the Community Infrastructure initiative
  8. Bloomberg · Report on EQT's battery-storage investment