WSS: Neocloud expansion and leasing activity continues to push forward and expand on a global basis
We took a week off with the Monday summary to host the infra / STRUCTURE summit in las Vegas. We will have summaries in the coming weeks, but we’d like to take this time to thank everybody who took the time from their busy schedules to attend. It was our best event yet, with over 600 people coming through the door and almost 800 registrations, and we look forward to bigger and better things in 2027. Save the dates now: October 19-21, 2027 again at Wynn Las Vegas. We’d like to thank all the sponsors for the overwhelming support. We couldn’t be more grateful. And a special shout-out to our cornerstone sponsor Citizens for helping make the journey to Las Vegas (our third year in Vegas) possible.
Earnings season is around the corner and two infrastructure companies that we track, with fiscal year reporting cycles that don’t align with the calendar year, have reported. Last month, we looked at the results coming from Oracle and last week, hyperscale data centre operator Applied Digital reported. Applied Digital has leased 1.4GW of capacity and is executing steadily, with the Polaris Forge 1 campus in North Dakota now with 250MW of operational capacity for anchor tenant CoreWeave. Applied Digital recently confirmed a lease in Alabama, and now is set to move outside the US for the first time, and will build a data centre campus in Finland as it continues to build where the energy and expansion runway is located.
Finland, not coincidentally, is seeing significant levels of activity. New company formation is an ongoing trend on all sides of the infrastructure game and is picking up pace in Finland. Verda raised a Series B round while Sesterce is making a €10b investment for a data centre and infrastructure delivery capabilities near Helsinki. Meanwhile, Equinix’s atNorth is planning a fifth data centre in the Helsinki area. And back in the US, young neocloud firms are building momentum. Runpod shared data points about its aggressive growth trajectory and General Compute is partnering with Cerebras as its builds out a multi-silicon approach to inference scenarios.
Infrastructure expansion and procurement continues to happen at an aggressive pace, with large-scale deals a regular part of the landscape. There is credible reporting that Tencent Cloud has signed a five-year deal worth $7b with Oracle Cloud for cloud infrastructure capacity. There are various geopolitical ramifications and use of cloud infrastructure in a service-based delivery model outside China is a way for Chinese hyperscalers to access and use technology that may fall under US government restrictions. We will continue to track this as things play out. Inference workloads continue to drive adoption of cloud infrastructure services and involves both GPUs and CPUs. The deal volume is rising and Akamai has been a beneficiary having just locked up a multi-billion deal with a frontier lab. Akamai is seeing material momentum and in the past week disclosed details on the latest deal momentum in the enterprise and technology space.
Neocloud expansion also continues to play out on a global basis. CoreWeave recently confirmed its first APAC-based expansion, choosing Indonesia for a deployment of 360MW. CoreWeave has now made a decision on its second data centre location in APAC, confirming plans to stand up a deployment in India. This is to be a 240MW deployment with additional expansion runway.
Finally, the past few weeks also saw activity on the hiring front as the competition for talent becomes fiercer by the day. Crux AI hired a chief development officer from Meta and NVIDIA brought in a senior data centre person with a strong hyperscale background.
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