Startup Nscale’s CEO pay nearly matched the FTSE 100 record, because of course it did

MainFT:

Nvidia-backed AI cloud provider Nscale has filed to go public in the US just two years after it was spun out of a crypto mining group, in a multibillion-dollar bet that investor enthusiasm for computing infrastructure projects will endure growing calls for an AI slowdown. The London-headquartered group, which counts former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg as members of its board, is targeting a valuation of up to $35bn in its initial public offering, said people familiar with the matter.

Nvidia-backed AI cloud provider Nscale has filed to go public in the US just two years after it was spun out of a crypto mining group, in a multibillion-dollar bet that investor enthusiasm for computing infrastructure projects will endure growing calls for an AI slowdown.

The London-headquartered group, which counts former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg as members of its board, is targeting a valuation of up to $35bn in its initial public offering, said people familiar with the matter.

FT Alphaville has written a few times already about Nscale. It’s late on a Friday: realistically we’re not going to pull off a deep dive into the company’s just-filed S-1 at this time of the week, and you’re even less likely to read it.

But a couple of bits did catch our eye. Firstly, we’re used to IPO filings being packed with bold estimates for the future, but charts that exaggerate the present at the expense of the future are a little rarer. It rather suggests a company is all pipe, no power when it has to present graphs like this:

Let’s recreate that using, you know, an actual Y-axis:

Nice!

The other thing is the boss’s pay. Remarkably for the leader of a company of its age and size, Nscale’s 32-year-old CEO Josh Payne bagged total compensation of £17.2mn last year — just shy of the FTSE 100’s top-paid boss in 2025, AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot, who got £17.7mn. Nice work if you can get it.

Amazingly, that still didn’t make Payne Nscale’s best-paid executive last year. That honour went to Jing Yin:

In dollar terms, Yin, an Alibaba veteran, received total compensation of $24.7mn to Payne’s measly $23.2mn (in both instances, it should be noted, it was mainly stock awards).

Yin’s role? President, APAC. Here’s Nscale’s global portfolio map, also released in the S-1 filing, showing its contracted capacity in that region — a single 24MW facility in an Indonesian co-location data centre:

We’re sure Yin’s been doing some important stuff, but as things stand that looks like a million a megawatt. Very nice work if you can get it.