We numerically study the spectral properties, the entanglement and the zero-temperature phase structure at nonvanishing chemical potential of the O(3) nonlinear sigma model. Using matrix product states, a particular kind of one-dimensional tensor network state, we show that we are able to reach the asymptotic scaling regime and to reproduce the analytical predictions for the mass gap at vanishing chemical potential. In addition, we study the scaling of the entanglement entropy towards the continuum limit obtaining a central charge consistent with 2. Moreover, our approach does not suffer from the sign problem and we also explore the phase structure of the model for nonzero chemical potential and map out the location of the transitions between different charge sectors with high precision.