The neocloud category may be the most misunderstood corner of the AI trade because the market still treats these names as one uniform GPU-hours bet when they are actually very different business models:
1. $NEBIUS(NBIS)$ (Cloud Utility for the Agentic AI Age)
$NVIDIA(NVDA)$ just chose Nebius as an architecture partner for the agentic AI era by co-designing AI factories with them, and the Rubin GPU access that comes with this partnership means Nebius gets the next-generation inference stack before almost anyone else in the market. At a $28B market cap, a 5GW power target and Nvidia’s engineering team embedded in the stack.. this is my favorite name in the neocloud category.
2. $IREN Ltd(IREN)$(Energy-to-Compute Engine of the AI Era)
The dilution fear is real but the market is misreading it. IREN is not diluting to survive but diluting to scale into a $3.7B ARR target and the $9.3B in funding already secured through customer prepayments and GPU financing means the $6B ATM is optionality capital. The real bottleneck in AI infrastructure right now is power and IREN controls ~4.5GW of secured capacity while needing only ~500MW to support its ARR target by year-end. That 10x ratio of power capacity to near-term need is something no competitor can replicate quickly.
3. $Cipher Mining Inc.(CIFR)$ (Landlord of the AI Utility Era)
Cipher is not a pure neocloud but is a hyperscale infrastructure landlord signing decade-long leases to $Amazon.com(AMZN)$ AWS and $Alphabet(GOOGL)$while they fill the shells with compute. The AWS lease alone is expected to generate ~$700M in average annualized NOI for the next decade at nearly 100% NOI margins. Power-rich land is the scarcest resource in AI infrastructure and Cipher controls it with 600MW fully contracted, both facilities fully funded through non-recourse fixed-rate project debt and a 3.4GW development pipeline.
4. $CoreWeave, Inc.(CRWV)$ (The Fragile Giant)
CoreWeave’s demand backlog and revenue growth are very real but none of that matters if the capital markets close for even one quarter. Interest expense hit $388M in Q4 and management guided Q1 2026 interest expense to ~$550M which implies an annualized run rate above $2B before a single new data center comes online. The bull case requires capital markets to stay open, rates to cooperate, hyperscalers to honor take-or-pay contracts in full and construction to stay on time. That is a lot of dependencies in a macro environment where oil is approaching $100 and private credit is already showing signs of stress.
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