WSS: Neocloud momentum translating into more data centre infrastructure consumption as self-builds continue
It was a busy week for the sector even with public holidays in the UK, US and Canada. The neocloud and AI infrastructure space again saw significant activity. CoreWeave disclosed a number of significant customer wins of enterprise customers, while Groq increased its capital raise this year to $1b, securing $350m in its recent Series A. NVIDIA joined this round as Groq just became a NVIDIA cloud partner and will look to expand the GroqCloud business footprint on a global basis. Demand for NVIDIA silicon remains robust and AWS committed to deploying 1m GPUs this year and just confirmed it will add another 2m GPUs through 2027-2028. Meanwhile, NVIDA continues to help its ecosystem get to market through financial support and signed agreements with six financial firms as it looks to aggregate $500b in capital for NVIDIA end users and partners.
We also continue to review the results coming from a long earnings season. Rackspace reported relatively sluggish growth as it looks to transition the business to managed enterprise AI. Its results show the divide between legacy and traditional services, and the faster growth seen by next-generation and AI-oriented services. New listed companies continue to pop up and the latest neocloud to go public is Qumulus AI. Qumulus AI has signed a number of cloud contracts and leased data centre colocation capacity to support it. We also looked at the results coming from Nebius, and on the hyperscale side, Tencent recently reported and it also showed some growth acceleration in line with the results coming from other hyperscalers.
The hyperscalers were busy in the past week and pursuing various self-builds around the world. Microsoft is working on a development in France and Google has kicked off its major project in India, which is not necessarily a full self-build and is also said to involve third party data centre operators. AWS is self-building in Europe, with a project near Berlin, Germany focused on sovereign cloud and AI services.
Europe is seeing community opposition to data centres and governments are exercising more scrutiny over development projects. In the past week, we look quickly at recent developments in Denmark and Scotland. The Scottish government is looking for more visibility into data centre projects and Denmark has been reconsidering priorities in the grid queue. Regulatory oversight is also ongoing in Singapore, which put in a moratorium several years back and has only recently started to open up capacity for development. The latest round in Singapore saw four data centre operators win permission to develop 50MW of capacity each in a designated data centre area. Notably, this time around, no hyperscalers won bids.
And on the strategic side in APAC, we saw the KKR acquisition of STT GDC official close, and South Korea’s SK Telecom spun out various assets to form an enterprise-focused data centre business called SK Horizon.
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