WSS: Neocloud expansion moves to next level, taking up cloud and data centre colocation; cryptocurrency movement to sector in motion
The past week saw yet more activity around neocloud expansion. The neoclouds are aggressively building out infrastructure to support large-scale GPU installations and going to where they can find the land and energy. Cryptocurrency companies with these assets are a logical destination and continue to move into the sector, building purpose-built data centres for HPC, AI and hyperscale infrastructure.
In recent weeks, FluidStack has emerged as an aggressive buyer of capacity and it is working closely with the aforementioned cryptocurrency firms. It recently leased hundreds of MWs from TeraWulf in upstate New York and in the past week signed on with Cipher Mining for a 10-year agreement that will deliver 168MW of IT load in west Texas. This was a data centre colocation deal. On the cloud side, CoreWeave continues to be a cloud infrastructure platform of choice for hyperscale customers looking for GPU capacity wherever they can get it and within a shorter time frame. Both Meta and OpenAI expanded their service agreements with CoreWeave. OpenAI is now committed to $22.4b in cloud infrastructure while Meta is now up to $14.2b.
Meanwhile, the Stargate initiative with OpenAI and Oracle Cloud at the centre, continues to push forward. The maiden project in Abilene, Texas is now officially online and running and Crusoe is the data centre operator. The Stargate expansion plans now cover five additional locations in the US and one of them in New Mexico is being built in partnership with STACK Infrastructure. Over in Europe, UK-based neocloud Nscale is supporting the Stargate UK expansions and just raised $1.1b to support these efforts.
The end of the month brings with us a quick look at some of the latest key developments and trends. We tracked a significant volume of investment activity in the past month and last week saw Datacenter United and DataBank secure more financing as well. AI startups are also raising capital and these resources are a big driver behind what we are seeing play out in demand for cloud and data centre colocation. Our monthly insights also looked at what CoreWeave is doing and delves into the momentum behind Stargate that is picking up.
There was also an uptick in CEO movement over the past month. Oracle and Rackspace have new CEOs and this past week Flexential confirmed that COO Ryan Mallory will take over for Chris Downie as CEO of Flexential after a nearly decade-long run. Finally, on the strategic side, Cologix acquired the underlying real estate at a data centre site in Markham, outside Toronto, while Blue Owl Capital and the Qatar Investment Authority teamed up to launch a digital infrastructure platform. This development points to more capital formation activity potentially in support of building more AI-oriented infrastructure on a global basis. As we move into the last part of the year, AI infrastructure expansion activity continues to pick up pace and is moving out globally.
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