THE $35 BILLION IPO JUST LOST ITS ONLY CUSTOMER — 23,000 NVIDIA CHIPS, NO ELECTRICITY

Microsoft has dropped its anchor agreement at Nscale's planned AI data center in Loughton, England, after grid officials warned the roughly 50-megawatt site may not receive power until the 2030s. The project was pitched as a flagship UK AI facility, stocked with Nvidia chips to run Microsoft's Azure services locally, but connection queues in the UK can hold up data center projects for as long as 13 years, leaving developers with land and hardware they cannot switch on.

Both companies say the move concerns one site rather than their broader partnership, but the timing is awkward for Nscale, which recently filed for a U.S. IPO and has pointed to big-name customers such as Microsoft and Anthropic while competing with providers like CoreWeave and Lambda. Anchor tenants underpin data center financing by making future cash flows predictable, so a power date slipping into the 2030s raises the cost of capital and invites investor scrutiny of contract quality and build timelines, even amid strong demand for AI computing.