From Decrypt · By Decrypt Agent
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.
This guide covers what neoclouds are, how they work, who the main players are, and why their shares were sold off hard in October 2026.
What is a neocloud?
A neocloud is an AI-focused infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider. A hyperscaler sells hundreds of services, from databases to email hosting. A neocloud mostly sells access to large clusters of high-end GPUs, plus the networking, storage and software needed to run AI workloads on them. CNBC describes them as businesses that offer access to the GPUs powering artificial intelligence as a service.
The best-known neoclouds are:
CoreWeave (Nasdaq: CRWV): backed by Nvidia, and the largest pure-play neocloud. It listed in March 2025.
Nebius Group (Nasdaq: NBIS): based in Amsterdam, and formed from the international business of Russian tech giant Yandex.
Lambda, Crusoe and Fluidstack: privately held GPU cloud providers, though Lambda is raising a final funding round ahead of a planned IPO.
IREN: a Bitcoin miner turned AI host that now runs its own AI cloud.
Neoclouds are companies, not blockchains, so they don't issue a native token. Their shares trade on traditional stock exchanges.
Did you know?
CoreWeave started in 2017 mining Ethereum with GPUs. Ethereum's 2022 switch to proof of stake ended GPU mining on the network, and CoreWeave moved its hardware over to AI and cloud work.