AI Infrastructure Leaders: The Neocloud equity investment case

27 Jan 2027
Leadership Stage
M&A , Datacentre , Cloud

The Neocloud market remains in land-grab mode, with platforms racing to secure power, GPUs and anchor customers while Hyperscalers look outside their own build programmes for capacity. But access to these scarce inputs is not necessarily the same as a durable business. The equity question is: what remains valuable once supply catches up? Control of the grid connection, the ability to move quickly to ready-for-service, or a platform that owns the customer relationship and can scale beyond one AI demand cycle? This session will explore:

  • Is a Neocloud fundamentally a GPU capacity trade, or a durable infrastructure platform? and where does the real economic moat sit: the platform itself, access to power, or something else once GPU scarcity eases?
  • Are Neoclouds ultimately enabling Hyperscalers to build faster, or creating businesses that could eventually compete with them?
  • Does the size and flexibility of the balance sheet ultimately determine who can scale and compete in compute?
  • How much customer concentration can investors accept, and is there an investable case for a Neocloud without a hyperscale tenant?
  • With concerns emerging around Neocloud tenancy in recent transactions, are European investors more cautious than their US counterparts? And what can operators do to get investors comfortable with the risk?
Moderator
Sylvain Loizeau
Sylvain Loizeau, Principal - Analysys Mason
Speakers
Ben Richardson
Ben Richardson, SVP Strategy - CoreWeave
Michel Boutouil
Michel Boutouil, CEO - Polarise