After a week of plunging stock prices and scrapped IPO plans, industry executives expect a shakeout among up-and-coming AI cloud providers. Nvidia has a lot riding on how it plays out.
Hundreds of AI cloud providers are rushing into the market right now. Two executives from the data center and neocloud industries told The Information that only seven to ten of them will still be around in a few years. Several executives think consolidation is inevitable.
Their predictions come after a week in which some investors lost confidence in the so-called "neoclouds." Australian provider Firmus abruptly pulled its IPO, and shares of CoreWeave and its smaller rivals fell about 20 percent, according to The Information. Bloomberg reports that CoreWeave lost a quarter of its market value, while a measure of its credit risk hit a record high.
"We'll definitely see consolidation," said David Driggers, CEO of neocloud provider Cirrascale. He expects deep-pocketed asset managers, along with telecom and fiber companies, to "pick up a neocloud here, a neocloud there."
British provider Nscale shows how shaky things have gotten. According to The Telegraph, Microsoft pulled out of a data center deal in Loughton, England, where it had planned to lease 23,000 Nvidia chips. Utility providers don't expect power at the site until the 2030s. Nscale said its relationship with Microsoft remains "strong and long-term."
At the same time, some investors are pushing to cut Nscale's target market cap from about $30 billion to between $16 billion and $19 billion, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter.
Nvidia's sales depend on the neoclouds that build their own data centers
Not every bankruptcy would hit equally hard, according to The Information. CoreWeave mostly leases its data centers, so those sites could find new tenants more easily. Nebius, IREN, and Nscale build their own facilities. If they run into financial trouble, the buildout itself could stall, and Nvidia's sales along with it.
Neoclouds matter to Nvidia because its biggest customers are developing their own chips. The customer segment outside the hyperscalers, which includes the neoclouds, brought in $40 billion in the July quarter. That's 45 percent of Nvidia's data center revenue and more than double the figure from a year earlier.
Nvidia is propping up the industry with equity investments, chip allocations, loan guarantees, and customer leads. A team led by Jensen Huang's son-in-law, Nico Caprez, is now even helping neoclouds find sites with available power. Nvidia has also changed its loan guarantees, according to one executive. Larger neoclouds turned down the first offer, which Nvidia made in exchange for a share of their future revenue. It now offers shorter terms for a smaller cut.
Analysts and rivals doubt most neoclouds will survive
Analysts aren't convinced many of these providers can last. Gartner predicts that 80 percent of independent neoclouds will "cease independent operations" by 2030. Bernstein estimates that only 35 percent of the data center capacity announced in North America will ever get built, according to Bloomberg.
The criticism is also coming from inside the industry. CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator blames smaller rivals like Firmus, Lambda, and Nscale for the turmoil, Bloomberg reports. In a memo to employees, he wrote that they're "trying to raise enormous amounts of capital without the execution, revenue, scale, or software solutions that CoreWeave delivers to its customers."
Even if every project gets built, there's another problem. One neocloud executive said it's a given that compute supply will eventually outstrip demand. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a similar argument on a podcast in late February 2025. He said he expected an oversupply of compute starting in 2027 and that the industry was too focused on supply instead of actual demand. "The only thing that's going to happen with all these data centers is that prices will fall," Nadella said.
Around that time, Microsoft canceled or delayed data center projects in the UK and several US states, including Ohio. Microsoft is still a key customer for Nscale. According to The Telegraph, more than 40 percent of Nscale's $103 billion in contracted revenue comes from Microsoft.
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