WSS: More neocloud capital raising and new company formation as landscape continues to diversify
The past week saw more activity from the neocloud space, while new operating platforms continued to form in pursuit of the overall growth opportunity across the infrastructure ecosystem. Elsewhere in the sector, we saw global AI and neocloud expansion in APAC and there was strategic activity of note as operators continue to zero in on a primary area of focus and expertise.
In the neocloud infrastructure space, notable capital raising activity took place. Crusoe operates data centres and is building a neocloud and raised $3.9b in a Series F round with a valuation over $30b, while Nebius recently raised more debt to support expansion plans. Neocloud expansion is quickly becoming global and a significant portion it is being driven by the frontier labs. OpenAI is deploying with Australia’s Firmus’s cloud infrastructure platform being built in Malaysia, and there are reports that Anthropic is working with a data centre operator on a gigawatt-level deployment in Australia. The activity follows CoreWeave revealing its APAC expansion plans in recent weeks, choosing Indonesia as its location. CoreWeave is also reported to be working with a data centre colocation provider. Overall, CoreWeave continues to build momentum and shared an update on material momentum in 3Q26 leasing. It has confirmed $25b in new customer commitments in just the last several months.
The lines between neocloud and hyperscale clouds will blur at some point, and it will probably happen sooner than later. The JV formed between Blackstone and Google is a case in point. The JV’s new cloud operating platform will be called Crux AI and it is being formed to address large-scale AI requirements that will run on a TPU-based cloud infrastructure platform, with Google’s cloud management know-how. It may sounds a bit contradictory, but the AI infrastructure space is set to see both blurring lines and separation at the same time. These two things can be true at the same time.
The growth of the sector continues to draw in investors and both JVs and consortiums are coming together to create new operating platforms. Crux AI is one of them and another one is Theseus Infrastructure and they just named a new CEO this past week. Meanwhile, in Europe, a number of former operators from Global Switch are launching a new operating platform called Astor.
Finally, we continue to dig through the recent earnings season, which continues to see wider and wider participation from across the ecosystem. SpaceX is now reporting an AI infrastructure segment and we look at some of the details. The data centre space has seen not just new company formation but transition from the cryptocurrency space and many of these are public companies. We have looked at their results over the last few months and they continue to double down on the sector. Hut 8 has signed a number of new leases and recently sold off its managed infrastructure and cloud customer base as it narrow its focus and zeroes in on HPC and AI and hyperscale data centre infrastructure.
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