WSS: More growth from cloud and hyperscale coming out of earnings as neocloud continues to push growth and expansion
Earnings season continued to move along and in the past week we looked at the results coming from a diverse range of infrastructure providers. The APAC region has Alibaba as a publicly listed bellwether and it recently reported, showing meaningful revenue growth acceleration in line with the performance of the other hyperscalers as uptake in AI services continues to be a driver. The cloud infrastructure market continues to widen with neocloud providers and Megaport reported its 1H26 results, which also marked the end of the fiscal year. Megaport got into the cloud infrastructure game just last year through the acquisition of Brazil’s Latitude.sh and has picked up significant momentum in the last several months, signing multiple cloud deals at a TCV of ~AU$1.3b. The sector continues to see growth from cryptocurrency turned colocation providers and we have been tracking their earnings, with Cipher Digital being the latest. Another provider that is making this transition, and dabbling in both cloud and colocation, is Bitdeer, and we look at its plans to convert latent cryptocurrency assets into digital infrastructure. Across this segment, leases are being signed and revenue is starting to be recognized, showing that there is real progress being made based on viable execution. Meanwhile, silicon vendors are also moving into cloud infrastructure delivery and we took a closer look at the results coming from Cerebras and it is signalling its intentions in cloud through hundreds of MWs of data centre leasing activity.
The neocloud space continues to drive activity across the sector. On the financing side, Australia’s Firmus raised $2b in an equity round to support builds in the APAC region, while CoreWeave secured a $2.6b loan to meet customer contracts. Nscale is another neocloud provider seeing accelerating growth and we look at a few data points that articulate its trajectory. Expansion plans are a good indicator of demand and Crusoe revealed plans to develop another gigawatt-level campus in Texas, building on the momentum in Abilene, Texas where the Stargate project originally launched. Crusoe’s energized land partner for these projects is Lancium and it is reported to be receiving a significant investment from NVIDIA as it continues to support various pieces across the AI and data centre infrastructure ecosystem.
The development of neoclouds is also drawing in legacy operating platforms like IBM Cloud that have been quiet for a while. Neocloud Together AI recently agreed to run inferencing on IBM Cloud, enabled by NVIDIA systems. Could IBM Cloud be getting into the neocloud game? It is a bit early to say, but it is clear that there is demand for infrastructure resources that are available within an aggressive timeline, which is what appears to be the case here.
At the end of every month, we publish our monthly insights and we touched on a number of the themes mentioned above. We look at neocloud deal volume and the crypto to colo leasing momentum, while also reviewing what happened during the ongoing earnings season. The results are revealing and speak to the overall growth acceleration across the sector, while KPIs like RPO and CapEx commitments are also telling indicators that we have closely tracked. The past week also saw us publish our quarterly bulletin.
We also wanted to quickly mention our upcoming executive summit, which is set to take place in Las Vegas on October 6-8 at the Wynn hotel. The pricing on tickets will go up on September 7 at 12:01am so register now. Our room block at the Wynn is also close to full. Let us know if you have any questions about the summit. This year features an outside guest speaker – professional poker player Mario Ho – and a neocloud forum to be held on October 6 to kick off the show. Our 1:1 meeting track has also received a lot of interest and participation is limited so get in on this as soon as possible. You will see other large-scale conferences try to emulate what we are doing with 1:1 meetings and creating a speed-dating type environment. This is absolutely not what we are trying to create. We are hosting a focused executive summit. Our 1:1 track is meant for targeted and curated infrastructure capacity conversations between compute providers (whether hyperscale, neocloud or frontier lab) and infrastructure suppliers. No gimmicks, no randomness and thoughtfully organized.
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