Nscale has added Fidji Simo to its board of directors, a week after Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources, that the company is looking to raise up to $3.5 billion ahead of a planned IPO. Simo led AGI deployment at OpenAI, effectively the lab's second most senior executive, until she stepped down in July for health reasons; she continues to advise OpenAI part-time. Nscale, founded two years ago, designs, builds and operates data centers for AI, and its valuation has climbed sharply over those two years on demand for AI infrastructure.
Josh Payne, Nscale's founder and chief executive, said Simo is one of the few executives who understand how to scale products for billions of users and what demands such products place on the underlying systems. That, he said, is exactly what Nscale is building its infrastructure for. He described the board as deliberately assembled from people with experience scaling platforms to the largest level in the world, along with the independence, financial discipline and deep operational experience that companies of this size require.
The stated rationale and the actual fit point in different directions. Nscale does not have a consumer product with billions of users; it has racks, power and customers who do. The line on Simo's résumé that maps onto the company's next twelve months is not the AGI work at OpenAI but Instacart, where she was chair and chief executive and took the company public in 2023. Before that she spent more than a decade at Meta, including a period running the Facebook app. She also sits on Shopify's board. Payne's second sentence — independence, financial discipline, operational experience — is the language of a listing prospectus, not of a hiring announcement.
That is the honest reading of the timing. Companies do not recruit IPO veterans a week after a pre-IPO round leaks unless the listing is the organising event. A private raise of up to $3.5 billion for a business that has to buy land, power and chips before it books revenue suggests the company intends to reach public markets while demand for AI capacity is still being priced generously.
Notably absent from the announcement is any account of the overlap. Simo is still advising OpenAI in a part-time capacity while joining the board of a company whose product is AI data center capacity, and neither Nscale nor Payne addressed how the two roles sit together. It may be handled perfectly well. It was simply not mentioned, in a week when the company was otherwise very interested in describing the independence of its board.
There is also a question of load. Simo left an operating role in July on health grounds and has taken a seat on a board, which is a lighter commitment than running a division — but it is a board seat at a two-year-old company about to attempt one of the harder transitions in corporate finance, on top of the Shopify board and the OpenAI advisory work.
Simo's last IPO was a grocery delivery company with a decade of operating history behind it. Nscale would go public roughly two years after it was founded, on the strength of a demand curve it does not control and has not had time to survive a downturn in.