Fidji Simo, who most recently led product and business operations at OpenAI, has joined the board of directors at Nscale, an AI infrastructure company that is reportedly preparing for a public market debut as soon as this month. The appointment adds a second executive with IPO experience to Nscale's leadership as the company rapidly builds out data center and computing infrastructure behind multibillion-dollar client commitments. Simo's background includes guiding Instacart through its 2023 listing and more than ten years at Meta, where she ran the Facebook application.
Simo departed her full-time position as CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI in July, though she continues in a part-time advisory capacity. Before OpenAI, she served as CEO and chair at Instacart, steering the grocery delivery platform through its public offering in 2023. She spent over a decade at Meta in various roles, including leading the Facebook app, and currently holds a board seat at Shopify. Nscale has entered into a computing-capacity agreement with Anthropic valued at roughly $45 billion and is constructing a large data center campus in Norway for Microsoft, according to Bloomberg. The company also purchased AI workload software provider Anyscale during the summer months.
According to Nscale's announcement, Simo stated that access to compute can shape the speed at which companies translate AI research into products reaching millions of users, drawing on her firsthand observations. The company's CEO noted that very few leaders grasp what large-scale products require from the underlying systems supporting them. Revenue connected to the Anthropic deal isn't anticipated to begin flowing until a West Virginia facility becomes operational at the close of 2027, the report states.
The board expansion gives Nscale additional credibility with public-market investors, but the company still faces the challenge of converting its expanding infrastructure commitments into consistent revenue streams. Construction timelines, power supply, customer concentration, and the massive capital requirements needed to bring AI data center capacity online all represent execution risks, particularly with revenue from its largest contract more than two years away. For channel partners, Nscale's growth trajectory may open doors in networking, power systems, cooling, integration, software, and managed infrastructure offerings, though a public listing would intensify pressure to demonstrate that multibillion-dollar agreements can translate into predictable earnings and profit margins. The composition of the board now reflects what public investors will likely demand: evidence that ambitious infrastructure plans can produce sustainable financial performance, not just headline-grabbing deal announcements. Companies positioning themselves for public markets often face a fundamental tension between the long lead times inherent in physical infrastructure and the quarterly performance expectations that come with an exchange listing.