The newest member of Nscale’s board is Fidji Simo, an executive with a public-company track record and a long history of scaling consumer products. The British startup is working toward a listing of its own.
Meta was her first stop, and she stayed for more than ten years. By the end of that run she was in charge of the Facebook app. Instacart came next, and she took it public in 2023 as chief executive. At OpenAI she oversaw AGI deployment, the number two job at the lab, until she left in July on health grounds; a part-time advisory role continues. She is also a Shopify director.
She joins Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker and former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg on a board Nscale has assembled with public markets in mind. The company designs, builds and operates AI data centers, and Bloomberg has reported it is trying to raise up to $3.5B ahead of an IPO expected this fall.
Nscale’s founder and chief executive, Josh Payne, put the case for her simply: few people understand the strain that billions of users place on the systems beneath a product. That is the problem his company exists to solve, he said, and the board was assembled deliberately for the financial discipline, independence and operating depth public-market investors expect.
Deals have kept pace. Two US campuses drew $3B in loans in September, Anthropic rents compute from the company under a $45B arrangement, and robotics developer Figure buys GPUs from it. Two years after founding, its valuation has climbed sharply.
