What Is a Neocloud? The GPU Clouds Powering the AI Boom

In brief

• Neoclouds are specialist cloud providers, such as CoreWeave and Nebius, that rent clusters of Nvidia GPUs to AI labs, startups and Big Tech firms.
• Many have crypto roots: CoreWeave started out mining Ethereum, and Bitcoin miners have signed AI hosting deals worth billions with Microsoft, Amazon and Anthropic.
• Neocloud shares sold off in October 2026 after Gartner predicted that more than 80% of providers will stop operating independently by 2030.

Training and running modern AI models takes a huge amount of computing power, almost all of it from graphics processing units (GPUs). For most of the past decade, renting servers meant going to one of the "hyperscalers": Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. When the ChatGPT boom set off a scramble for GPUs, a new kind of company stepped in to meet the demand. These are the neoclouds.

Neoclouds are specialist cloud providers that do one thing: rent out GPU capacity for AI training and inference (running a trained model to answer requests). They have gone from unknown startups to listed companies with contracts worth billions of dollars, and their roots in crypto run deep. CoreWeave began as an Ethereum miner, and a wave of Bitcoin miners is now turning its power-hungry sites into AI data centers.