Meet the Data Center Builders Behind A.I.’s Next IPO Wave

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei may cinch the most coveted magazine covers and even get a reluctant taste of Hollywood stardom—Amodei sat for interviews in a buzzy Sundance documentary this year, while Altman is about to be portrayed on screen by Andrew Garfield in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial—but the defining financial drama of the era is playing out on ranchland, farmland and the floor of an Appalachian river valley, where data centers are built. The people running the largest data centers often don’t get the viral headlines. Now, three of them are weighing initial public offerings.

Nscale, the London-based A.I. cloud company founded by Bitcoin miner Josh Payne two years ago, could go public in the U.S. as soon as this month. Vantage Data Centers, run by developer Sureel Choksi since 2013, is exploring an IPO or a sale as soon as next year that could value it at $100 billion, per Reuters. Tareq Amin, the CEO of Saudi Arabia’s state A.I. company, Humain, has reportedly hired an investor relations team for a dual listing in Riyadh and New York.

Until now, these data center builders have tapped into sovereign wealth, private equity, corporate investment and bank loans without selling shares to the public. Saudi Arabia is financing Humain through its Public Investment Fund, while Silver Lake and Marc Ganzi’s DigitalBridge have backed Choksi’s Vantage. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also pushed into infrastructure financing: in August, he signed agreements with a group of Wall Street investors seeking more than $500 billion for data centers equipped with Nvidia hardware.

Historically, data centers were financed like commercial real estate: developers put in the equity, banks lent against the lease, and rent from a tenant like Microsoft or Google paid down the loan over 10 or 15 years. Vantage was the first data center company to sell securitized bonds backed by its leases in 2018, and the pool of lenders and investors continued to widen after that, Vantage CEO Choksi told TMT Finance last year.

As A.I. has ballooned, so has the price tag: while a conventional data center project used to average about $475 million, an A.I.-ready one costs roughly three times as much. Choksi’s two flagship developments at Vantage, for example, are budgeted at $15 billion and $25 billion. Mega-campuses frequently require their own power plants and are leased to customers whose businesses are a few years old, meaning commercial lenders will not underwrite the liabilities against a single corporate balance sheet. Public equity markets offer the one pool of liquidity large enough to absorb that risk, which is why Amin, Payne and Choksi are preparing their offerings.

Tareq Amin turns Riyadh from a passive check writer to a hands-on contractor

Amin’s road to the stock market is the longest of the three. The telecom veteran built Rakuten’s mobile network in Japan before running Aramco’s digital arm. Since taking over Humain at its May 2025 launch, he has announced deals across his first 16 months at a startling pace.

Amin told Semafor he wants the country to be the “Switzerland of A.I.”—a neutral physical hub where foreign models run on domestic power. His pitch combines Saudi Arabia’s cheap electricity and abundant desert land with data centers that can rent compute capacity to foreign A.I. developers. The constraint is hardware. Nvidia and AMD chips require Washington’s export approval to ship. The Commerce Department cleared Humain last November to buy up to 35,000 of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, but shipments remain subject to individual licenses.

Shortly after its launch last year, Humain signed an agreement with Lisa Su’s AMD to deploy up to $10 billion for 500 megawatts of compute capacity over five years, matched by an equivalent supply commitment with Nvidia. Matt Garman’s Amazon Web Services joined Humain in a $5 billion-plus “A.I. Zone” for the kingdom, echoing the petroleum-rich Partitioned Zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Then, in October, a campus partnership valued at roughly $3 billion with Stephen Schwarzman’s Blackstone and its data center company AirTrunk was announced. By February 2026, Amin was putting $3 billion into Elon Musk’s xAI just before the company folded into SpaceX, an investment Amin told Semafor “was a home run.” Qualcomm and Cisco also signed framework agreements, without disclosing dollar figures.

Amin is raising an initial $2.5 billion fund through BSF Capital, the investment arm of Banque Saudi Fransi, to build server facilities inside the kingdom, per Bloomberg. On Sept. 6, Amin confirmed via LinkedIn that he was hiring a small team with investor relations and IPO experience to prepare for a dual listing in Riyadh and New York, a plan he first floated last October.

But even a sovereign fund wants partners, and lately, the fund has been encouraging its portfolio companies to raise outside capital, per Fortune. Amin’s hiring push signals an effort to institutionalize governance well ahead of Humain’s 2029 target.

Josh Payne swaps Bitcoin mining for Nvidia firepower

In Europe, Josh Payne took a different route into the compute market. Payne’s first foray was in Bitcoin mining, operating Arkon Energy on cheap Norwegian hydropower before spinning out Nscale in London in 2024. Payne figured out that the high-density server racks, low-cost cooling, and cheap power that keep chips from overheating could serve A.I. labs as effectively as his Bitcoin rigs. Nscale’s initial 30-megawatt plant above the Arctic Circle, powered by a century-old hydroelectric dam, became its first operational A.I. site.

On Sept. 3, Payne struck a hardware agreement with Brett Adcock’s robotics startup, Figure AI, to supply up to 100,000 of Nvidia’s next-generation chips: an initial commitment of $3.5 billion that scales past $6 billion, paired with an equity stake in Figure.

That hardware supply joins a six-year, $45 billion lease from Anthropic for 460 megawatts of capacity at Payne’s Monarch campus in Mason County, ., an off-grid site operating on its own natural-gas generators, with plans to expand beyond 8 gigawatts.

Payne has marketed roughly $103 billion in total contracted customer commitments across agreements averaging 5.7 years, which works out to roughly $18 billion annually, per . A person familiar with the company’s plans tells Observer that while the $103 billion reflects the total value of executed customer contracts, the sum is illustrative of long-term commitments rather than formal guidance for analyst modeling.

Nscale generated a little over $100 million in revenue for the three months ending June 30, per Bloomberg, operating about 25,000 active chips against roughly 289,000 total deployed or on order. Ahead of a U.S. listing that could raise about $3 billion as early as this month, Payne is assembling $3.5 billion in bridge financing—including up to $1.5 billion in convertible notes led by Daniel Loeb’s Third Point and about $2 billion from Nvidia—though the person familiar notes the round is not yet finalized.

Sureel Choksi’s $100 billion bet on poured concrete

A former chief financial officer of the fiber company Level 3 Communications, Sureel Choksi has led Vantage since 2013, scaling it from 21 employees into a multinational developer of large data center campuses.

In Port Washington, Wis., Vantage broke ground late last year on a $15 billion, four-building campus to host computing capacity for the Stargate initiative backed by OpenAI, Oracle and Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank. A second project, Frontier, a $25 billion, 10-building campus in Shackelford County, Texas, is due to switch on its first data center later this year, bringing Choksi’s two flagship builds to more than $40 billion. An initial offering could raise up to $10 billion at a valuation of roughly $100 billion, per Reuters, potentially making it the largest in data center history.

Vantage is backed primarily by private equity. Silver Lake and DigitalBridge led a $9.2 billion investment round in 2024.

The pipeline may not stop here. Chase Lochmiller’s Denver-based Crusoe, which is building a data center for Oracle, OpenAI and Microsoft in Texas, just raised $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation this month and is also considering a public listing.

Payne’s first building for Anthropic in West Virginia is due late next year; Choksi plans to switch on the first of Frontier’s 10 buildings in Texas before year-end; Amin has Humain’s dual listing targeted for the end of the decade. Jensen Huang, whose silicon powers all three footprints, called what comes next “the largest infrastructure buildout in human history” in January.

By the time Andrew Garfield’s version of Sam Altman reaches U.S. theaters at Christmas, the first of these data center landlords may already be trading on an exchange. Amin, Payne and Choksi are bringing capital markets an industrial asset class defined by physical constraints, and for investors, that buildout is something they can own: graded acreage with utility hookups, miles of chilled-water pipes, rows of behind-the-fence generation and high-voltage transmission lines.

Humain and Vantage did not respond to requests for comment. Crusoe declined to comment on its financing. An Nscale spokesperson provided background context on the company’s pipeline by email.