“The most likely outcome is an age of Amazing Abundance, where anyone can have anything they can think of.” by Elon Musk
This is also the future I want.
@ryangrowthh Fake demand
You still have to give the bot instructions. Until it can read your mind directly, you’re either typing commands or talking to it.
Do you think talking to your phone feels more normal, or talking to yourself while wearing sunglasses?
Elon has made a few posts about neoclouds, and he’s talking about access to capital which is central to the buildout is difficult to access. This is something that we have all come to know from Coreweave’s Credit Default Swaps hitting distressed levels, which was one of the catalysts behind the neocloud sell off.
He also says that there will be some consolidation in the neocloud space and I do agree with this. There are just way too many players in this space and most of them will probably realise that running a neocloud is not as easy as it seems.
Your job as an investor is to identify which companies will survive this consolidation. You want to access their 1) leadership, 2) execution history, 3) balance sheet, 4) funding method for the buildout, 5) business model (do they own power or rent), 6) certifications / partnerships. These are some criteria that I think is important to help form a thesis on whether a neocloud is good or not.
Smaller cap neoclouds have substantially higher risk so it’s worth paying more attention and being more stringent on the assessment. $NBIS and $CRWV are probably the safest bets, with names like $IREN, $CIFR, $WULF next. Then we have others like $BRUN, $SHAZ, $WYFI which are newer and may need more time to prove themselves.
Angry Neocloud investors on X think @elonmusk and @chamath are shorting $IREN, $NBIS, or $CRWV, as if these three represent the 200+ other neoclouds.
In reality, it’s the opposite.
If you carefully consider what they’re discussing, you’ll realize that when most Neoclouds get squeezed out of the market due to various issues, the survivors stand to benefit the most - because they’ve already proven strong execution and capital allocation ability.
Your job is to figure out whether $IREN, $NBIS, or $CRWV will be the ultimate winners.
Do your own homework.
🚨JUST IN: Chamath on neoclouds
"Some are definitely better than others."
In September, $IREN & $NBIS were named by Chamath as the expected top winners in the era of open source models.
In the financial services industry, compared with the latest agentic AI capabilities, Microsoft Copilot, Bloomberg’s ASKB, and FactSet’s AI features are already usable, but they’re still not much better than a rookie.
As someone with a portfolio of energized land assets here is what I am seeing:
1. Neoclouds are disorganized and poorly capitalized. Some are definitely better than others however.
2. Hyperscalers are intractable, bureaucratic organizations that take 3 months to do an NDA and want 18mo escrow periods. We built our portfolio by competing against these terms because of our speed and simplicity. The more future assets orgs like ours win, the bigger the problem for the hyperscalers downstream (see 3).
3. There are delays in the existing pipeline that will catch people off guard in 2027. Hyperacalers will (obviously) react by focusing on their own internal compute needs over any third party. If the third party is a model company, they will tell them to go through their model router where they will also take a non-trivial vig. Them telling Ant they have no compute for them (rumored in Ant’s S-1) if true is a huge tell that this is already happening.
All of this is to say that it does look like there will be a lot of partially stranded compute and compute sitting in inventory in 2027 than is currently forecasted. This is bought and paid for but effectively underearning (below total cost of capital) or collecting dust. We see this as true for everyone - model companies, hyperscalers, neoclouds except ONE (you can guess which one).
This dislocation will benefit two kinds of orgs: the non-bureaucratic big scalers who can build industrial scale quickly and the nimble, well capitalized players feeding them.
2027 will be a turbulent year because it will clear out a bunch of wrong/bad bets. It will also be a consolidation year for a few.