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

Josh Payne, Sureel Choksi and Tareq Amin built their data center businesses on private capital. As A.I. campuses swell into $15 billion and $25 billion projects, all three are weighing public listings to finance the next phase of growth.

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.

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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........

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