There are so many data center and compute announcements each and every day – billions of dollars, day after day, blurring into background noise.
But the one-two punch by CoreWeave on April 9th and 10th may be a milestone we look back on and realize it was the moment the “NeoCloud” moniker stopped fitting.
On April 9th, CoreWeave announced a $21 billion deal with Meta and the very next day (4/10), it announced it has entered a multi-year agreement with Anthropic to power its Claude AI models.
When I asked Gemini to explain what these deals mean as if I were a three-year-old, the answer was surprisingly apt: “Imagine you have the world’s largest LEGO set, but no room to build it. Meta and Anthropic are those ‘kids’. CoreWeave is the neighbor with a giant garage and special tables made for building really big things.”
The analogy holds. Under its agreement with Meta, CoreWeave will supply Meta with AI cloud capacity through December 2032 giving Meta the runway it needs for its next AI platform and access to NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin architecture sitting in CoreWeave’s proverbial ‘garage.’ While financial terms were not disclosed in its agreement with Anthropic, we know from the press release it is a “multi-year agreement” which will “bring compute online starting later this year.”
When NeoClouds first came on the scene, they were – as their name implies – new. But deals like these reframe the story entirely. CoreWeave isn’t a challenger brand anymore. It’s becoming exactly what its name always implied: COREinfrastructure for the hyperscalers pushing AI forward.
And CoreWeave isn’t alone. The field is crowding fast – and for good reason.
In the last five months over $120 Billion in NeoCloud partnerships have been announced. These aren’t pilot programs or letters of intent – they are long-term infrastructure commitments. Excluding the two deals mentioned above, the list is an impressive one:
- Nebius / Meta – $12B compute capacity deal (Announced November 2025)
- Fluidstack / Anthropic – $50B partnership in TX and NY (Announced November 2025)
- Nvidia / Nebius – $2B strategic investment in Nebius (Announced March, 2026)
- CoreWeave / Perplexity (Announced March, 2026)
- Meta / Nebius – $27 billion 5 year partnership (Announced March 2026)
Hyperscalers’ urgency towards and need for compute is only increasing.
In his Letter to Shareholders this past week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy did not mince words in addressing the compute demand crisis: “AWS could be growing even faster… we still have capacity constraints that yield unserved demand.” To frame the scale of that problem: AWS added 3.9GW of new power capacity last year alone and plans to double its total power capacity by end of 2027.
Power remains the ultimate bottleneck – and the NeoClouds hold the keys to that kingdom. The investor community has clearly noticed. As an example of this, in early March, Applied Digital (APLD) priced a $2.15 billion high yield offering. Order books peaked at ~$8.5 billion (4.0x oversubscribed). Based on strong order demand, the deal priced tight of its price talk at 6.75%. High yield investors are opening their arms (and wallets!) to the AI data-center related names. Over $16 billion has been raised in the high yield market for this space in the last five months alone.
The investor thesis is increasingly hard to argue with: Neo-Cloud revenues as a group exceeded $25 billion last year and are projected to surpass $400 billion within five years. A 58% CAGR is difficult for any portfolio manager to dismiss….
So perhaps it’s time to retire the ‘NeoCloud’ name altogether.
This group (Applied Digital, Lambda, Hut8, Fluidstack, Nebius, Crusoe) are no longer the “new” kids on the block but, rather a powerful relief valve, that enable that LEGO stack to continue to build higher and wider.