neocloud
In plain wordsA newer kind of cloud company that mainly rents out powerful AI chips, rather than the full range of computing services that giants like Amazon or Microsoft sell.
A cloud provider specializing in renting GPUGPU, abbr.: A computer chip first designed to draw video-game graphics that turned out to be ideal for AI, because it can do thousands of simple calculations at the same time. capacity for AI training and inference — typically bare-metal or lightly managed clusters of the latest accelerators joined by high-speed interconnectsinterconnect, n.: The wiring and networking that connect chips to each other — inside a server, across a data center, or within a single chip — so they can share data and work as one. — rather than the broad service catalogs of the established hyperscale clouds. Examples include CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda and Nscale. Neoclouds grew rapidly from 2023 on long-term capacity contracts with AI laboratories and large technology companies, which use them to add compute quickly and keep financial risk off their own balance sheets. Many finance chip purchases with debt secured on the chips themselves — by late 2025 CoreWeave alone had arranged more than US$12 billion of such GPU-backed loans — raising concerns about concentration, rapid chip obsolescence and exposure if AI demand falters.
We couldn't get H100s from our usual cloud, so we signed a one-year reservation with a neocloud.
Origin
In use among industry analysts by 2024 — the research firm SemiAnalysis published an 'AI Neocloud Playbook and Anatomy' that October — and common in financial journalism from 2025, as CoreWeave went public in March 2025 and signed multibillion-dollar contracts with OpenAI and Meta.
Related
- AI data centerAI data center, n.: A building or campus packed with AI chips, power equipment and cooling, built to train and run AI models. The biggest use as much electricity as a city.
- GPUGPU, abbr.: A computer chip first designed to draw video-game graphics that turned out to be ideal for AI, because it can do thousands of simple calculations at the same time.
- computecompute, n.: The raw computing power used to train and run AI, usually measured by how many specialized chips are used and for how long. With data and algorithms, it is a main driver of AI progress.
- circular dealcircular deal, n.: A business arrangement in which an AI chip or cloud supplier invests in, or lends to, a customer that then spends the money buying the supplier's own products.
- AI bubbleAI bubble, n.: The worry that investors are pouring far more money into AI companies, chips and data centers than AI will earn back soon, so that prices could crash as in the dot-com bust of 2000.
- StargateStargate, prop. n.: A giant venture announced in 2025 by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to build data centers in the United States for training and running AI, with a pledged $500 billion.
Sources
- Wikipedia contributors. Neocloud (in: AI data center). Wikipedia (accessed October 2026). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocloud
Mentioned in
AI factoryAI factory, n.: A data center built to turn electricity and data into AI models and AI answers at industrial scale; in Europe, also a public supercomputing hub that helps companies and researchers build AI., hyperscalerhyperscaler, n.: One of the few giant technology companies — such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta — that run vast networks of data centers and spend most of the money that builds AI computing., circular dealcircular deal, n.: A business arrangement in which an AI chip or cloud supplier invests in, or lends to, a customer that then spends the money buying the supplier's own products., CoreWeaveCoreWeave, prop. n.: An American company that rents out huge numbers of Nvidia graphics processors over the internet to AI developers such as Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta.