Section B · History

The 2025–2026 Enterprise Era

By 2025-2026, the neocloud category had matured into an enterprise infrastructure tier. Hyperscaler customers committed tens of billions over multi-year terms; the Stargate initiative pushed AI compute infrastructure to a generational scale; public listings (CoreWeave, Nebius) brought transparency.

Hyperscaler-tier commitments

The defining feature of 2025-2026 was the scale of hyperscaler commitments to neoclouds:

  • CoreWeave's Microsoft deals at $10B+.
  • CoreWeave's Meta deals reaching ~$35B total in announced and extended commitments through 2032.
  • Nebius's Microsoft commitment at $17B+.
  • Crusoe's Stargate-tied buildouts at potentially $100B+ exposure.

Aggregated, the hyperscaler commitments to neoclouds run into the hundreds of billions. This is a fundamentally different category than the 2022-2023 startup ecosystem.

Stargate

The Stargate initiative (OpenAI / Oracle / SoftBank / MGX / Microsoft) at $500B+ committed scale through the decade marked AI compute infrastructure as a generational investment. Multiple neoclouds participate in Stargate-related buildouts.

Stargate's scope dwarfs any individual neocloud and reshapes the entire AI compute industry's capital structure.

Public listings

Several neoclouds reached public markets:

  • CoreWeave IPO in 2025 on Nasdaq under CRWV.
  • Nebius relisting on Nasdaq under NBIS in late 2024.
  • Speculation about additional IPOs from private neoclouds.

Public listings bring transparency, capital, and pressure. Private peers face both opportunity and tougher competitive comparisons.

The shape of the enterprise era

By 2025-2026, the neocloud landscape has the following shape:

  • A small number of mega-scale players (CoreWeave, Crusoe, Nebius) with hyperscaler-tier commitments.
  • A larger group of mid-tier enterprise neoclouds (Lambda, others) serving mid-market AI demand.
  • Marketplace and inference platforms (Vast, RunPod, Together, Hyperbolic, TensorDock) serving developer and startup demand.
  • Hyperscalers participating as both buyers and sellers in a coopetition dynamic.
  • Compute futures markets emerging to financialize the underlying commodity.

Takeaway

The 2025-2026 enterprise era is the current state of the industry. The next chapter unpacks the business model taxonomy that's emerged.