Neocloud

Plain English. A cloud provider built almost entirely around renting GPU capacity for AI — CoreWeave, Lambda, Nebius, Nscale, Crusoe — as distinct from the general-purpose hyperscalers. Most are young, Nvidia-adjacent (as investee, customer or both), and financed with heavy debt against chips and customer contracts rather than a diversified balance sheet.

Why it moves money. Neoclouds absorb the capital expenditure and leverage that hyperscalers and labs prefer to keep off their own books, which makes them the purest listed exposure to AI compute demand — and the most fragile. Revenue is typically concentrated in a handful of AI customers, the collateral is depreciating silicon, and the model only works while rental rates hold. Their contracts are also the market's best public evidence for what compute is actually worth, and for how long.

What to watch. Customer concentration, the gap between contracted backlog and delivered revenue, whether losses narrow with scale, and what prior-generation GPUs rent for — that last number is the residual-value evidence every compute-backed financing depends on.

From the signals. Google itself is renting capacity from CoreWeave and Nebius to keep pace with demand. Anthropic's rented-compute pile reached roughly US$175bn of reported commitments, including US$35bn with Lambda. CoreWeave grew revenue 112% while its quarterly net loss widened to US$626m.