The hardware route
In May 2025, Spring agreed to use 2,304 Nvidia B200 chips at the Glomfjord facility. The site had previously housed a cryptocurrency-mining data center that was being converted for AI workloads.
The financing around the arrangement was substantial:
The structure allowed Bytedance to use Nvidia hardware that it could not buy in China, taking advantage of differences in US export rules. The arrangement was formally allowed, but the legal and reputational exposure remained with the company using the infrastructure.
A customer concentration problem with an expiry date
Nscale expects its largest customer to account for less than 20% of revenue this year. It also expects that share to keep falling as larger contracts with Microsoft and Anthropic expand.
That forecast gives the omission a second dimension. My read is that Nscale is presenting concentration as a temporary financial risk while leaving the more sensitive identity of the customer out of the IPO narrative. Growth from Microsoft and Anthropic may reduce the percentage, but it does not remove the questions attached to the underlying relationship.
What I’d want to know is how the filing characterizes Bytedance’s role in the arrangement and how Nscale assesses the associated export-control and reputational risks. The customer may become less important to the revenue mix, while the scrutiny around how it accessed the chips remains.
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