Weighing up the enterprise risks of neocloud providers | Computer Weekly

"Neocloud providers, which include the likes of Nscale, CoreWeave and Carbon3.ai, are having a somewhat disruptive impact on the market by making huge commitments to build out hyperscale datacentres in support of the UK government's AI growth agenda. These providers are also taking up capacity in colocation datacentres that some of the hyperscale cloud giants previously committed to renting space in, before pulling out."

"In the aggregate, future AI-ready datacentre capacity was contracted for a total of 414MW, versus 133MW in the comparable 2024 period. A chunk of that will be to neocloud providers offering purpose-built AI services, such as bare metal or graphics processing units (GPUs) as a service (GPUaaS) or inference with pay-as-you-go pricing."

"The problem is there is too much hype right now. And with neocloud, you're having companies that may be well capitalised but still have little experience in running cloud services. They might tick multiple financial boxes and successfully procure datacentre space or GPUs, but that might be their limit."

Neocloud providers including Nscale, CoreWeave, and Carbon3.ai emerged as a notable trend in 2025, specializing in niche sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure services. These companies are making substantial commitments to build hyperscale datacentres supporting the UK government's AI agenda. They are capturing colocation datacentre capacity that major hyperscalers previously reserved but abandoned. CBRE data shows AI-ready datacentre capacity contracted for 414MW in the first nine months of 2025, compared to 133MW in 2024. Neocloud providers offer purpose-built AI services including bare metal, GPU-as-a-service, and inference with pay-as-you-go pricing. With Gartner forecasting enterprise IT revenues will surge 10.8% to reach $6.2 trillion by 2026, enterprises face pressure to adopt these services. However, concerns exist about neocloud providers' operational experience despite their financial resources.

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