WSS: Neoclouds raise capital amid strong demand and leasing activity as more from earnings season shows continued hyperscale acceleration
It was a busy week in the neocloud space as providers raised capital, secured capacity and strategic partnerships, while winning large deals from hypescale customers. Inferencing-oriented neocloud Gimlet Labs raised a $300m Series B round with a value proposition built around multi-silicon. Meanwhile in Europe, France’s Mistral raised €3b at a valuation that surpassed €20b. Neoclouds were actively securing customer commitments and wins. ChronoScale, which spun out of Applied Digital this year, won a significant deal to provide 50MW of cloud infrastructure capacity to Microsoft and Mistral received a number of commitments from customers that will help fund data centre expansion activity. Neoclouds also entered strategic partnerships to build out footprints to support inferencing. Together AI teamed up with Equinix and NVIDIA and will deploy cloud infrastructure across Equinix’s global footprint.
Earnings season has come to a close, but different fiscal year calendars means Oracle reported its results, which were in line with what we saw from the hyperscale category in the 2Q26 reporting period. Revenue growth accelerated and there was some additional disclosure around movement in the RPO backlog. The diversity of the ecosystem means silicon is an important bellwether to track and we took a closer look at NVIDIA’s results. The growth at NVIDIA is of course a solid indicator for how fast neocloud growth will play out. Finally, there are a number of crypto to colo and cloud companies we are still tracking. In the past week, we looked at the progress at Ionic Digital, which has locked up an anchor tenant in Nscale and continues to transition to the data centre business.
Given the demand levels and how it is driving growth and expansion, capital raising and equipment financing continues to push forward. In the past week, we saw DigitalOcean secure $275m in equipment financing to fund growth initiatives being driven by healthy demand and customer commitments. DigitalOcean continues to lease data centre capacity and has raised guidance based on the momentum it has continued to build.
There was also activity in the strategic space this past quarter. There is continued investor appetite to back hyperscale data centre operating platforms and to combine assets to extend global reach. Brookfield acquired a stake in American Real Estate Partners and its data centre arm PowerHouse Data Centers to add to its portfolio, while Cloverleaf Infrastructure recently raised an undisclosed amount with backing from NVIDIA on top of the $300m raised last year.
On the regulatory side of things, there continues to be movement. In recent weeks, we saw Singapore open up more capacity for development for a select group of operators, while in Brazil, the long-awaited clarity around the ReData data centre bill now has the finish line in sight. ReData basically provides tax exemptions for data centres when it comes to critical equipment. The uncertainty around ReData has slowed developments in LatAm’s largest market as the situation has created uncertainty and the prospect of higher costs. This looks to be moving in a more favourable direction now.
Finally, there were more implications from the conflict in the Middle East as AWS confirmed that it lost customer data due to the attacks on its data centre facilities. This underscores the fact that DR plans are critical and will increasingly have to consider multi-region and multi-national redundancy.
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