WhiteFiber's Madison AI Campus Starts Billing on Nscale's $865 Million Deal

The old Unifi plant in Madison made polyester yarn. The building at 805 Island Drive has been a lot of things since the mill closed, but the new tenant is the first one that needed its own power plant. WhiteFiber's NC-1 campus has crossed from construction into live use, and money is now changing hands for the machines inside.

In an Aug. 12 release, WhiteFiber said initial billing had begun under a 10-year, 40-megawatt colocation agreement with Nscale valued at about $865 million. The campus is a roughly 96-acre industrial retrofit in Rockingham County, bought in 2025 for $45 million in cash by WhiteFiber, through Enovum. Management has described potential scale toward about 300 gross megawatts over time. That is aspiration, not a committed schedule, and a possible path to about 200 megawatts of total electrical supply depends on agreements and upgrades that have not been signed yet.

The deal under the headline

The Nscale contract, signed Dec. 18, 2025, covers 40 megawatts of critical IT load in two 20-megawatt phases. The roughly $865 million figure includes escalators and installation and excludes electricity passthroughs. Design targets cited by the company: Tier 3-equivalent, up to 150 kilowatts per cabinet, N+1 cooling, and an average PUE of 1.3 or better. WhiteFiber also markets direct-to-chip liquid cooling.

CEO Sam Tabar said Aug. 12: "At NC-1, we moved from construction into active customer deployment. Initial billing has commenced, and we expect to reach full contracted run-rate billing across the 40 megawatts of contracted IT load later this month."

The word "expect" is doing real work there. As of the Sept. 11 desk pass that locked this reporting, no later primary source confirms the full 40-megawatt run-rate was hit. On the earnings call, WhiteFiber cited about 20 megawatts of IT available for Nscale, plus an unnamed investment-grade offtaker. Colocation remaining performance obligations were about $932.9 million as of June 30, primarily from NC-1. Lender exclusivity is underway with no assurance of close.

The power question

The campus is "supported by" a 99-megawatt Duke Energy Carolinas capacity agreement. Read that phrase carefully. A May 2025 letter laid out phased targets and said an energy service agreement still had to be negotiated. The 99 megawatts are not energized capacity yet. The original April and May 2026 ready-for-service billing targets slipped into August, which is its own signal about how long the last mile takes.

There's also a data hygiene problem worth naming: the public NC-1 capacity calendar conflicts with the Duke letter and the earnings call detail. Treat the page as marketing until the filings and the meters agree.

What Madison says about it

When the project was announced, Rockingham County Board Chair Kevin Berger called a planned "over $1 billion" investment and "more than 60 jobs" a regional boost. The release footnoted those figures to the possible 200-megawatt path and to financing. Madison Mayor William Phillips called the Unifi conversion "a remarkable step forward for our local economy." No Nscale executive quote specific to this Madison contract was found, and we're not borrowing unrelated Series B comments to fill the gap.

What it proves, and doesn't

An AI campus is billing in Madison on a nine-figure colocation deal, inside a reused mill, on Duke's system. That's a different template from the greenfield zoning fights in other counties, and it shows the AI buildout will reuse what's already there when the power and the site cooperate.

What it doesn't prove: full run-rate is unconfirmed, and the 99-megawatt agreement is a letter, not a switch. The difference between what a company says and what a meter shows is where the reporting lives.

What to watch

• The run-rate confirmation. A primary source confirming all 40 megawatts billing would close the loop on the Aug. 12 claim.
• The second offtaker. The unnamed investment-grade customer on the earnings call, if named, changes the campus's risk picture.
• The Duke agreement. Whether the energy service agreement gets signed and the 99-megawatt capacity actually energizes.
• The Yadkin moves. WhiteFiber's Aug. 17 agreement to acquire two more development sites, one in a county with a data-center moratorium in play, is the next chapter of this story.

Sources: WhiteFiber via PR Newswire (Dec. 18, 2025; Aug. 12, 2026; Aug. 17, 2026) · Duke Energy capacity letter (May 2025) via LawInsider · earnings-call transcript · whitefiber.com/NC-1 · Construction Review · FOX8 · North State Journal (Sept. 4, 2026). Billing and megawatt figures are company-reported. Full 40 MW run-rate, as-built cooling, water use, and filled jobs were not independently confirmed as of the Sept. 11, 2026 source lock.