Nvidia makes GPUs. Companies want GPUs. Companies that don't own GPUs now rent them from 300 neoclouds.
A neocloud is apparently what we're calling the thing that happens when someone buys a server rack and puts up a website. The industry researcher counted over 300 of these operations. That's up 55% in less than a year. Which means roughly 106 people looked at the GPU shortage and thought "I should become a landlord but for processors."
The logic checks out. Nvidia GPUs cost more than a used Camry. If you can't buy one you rent one. If you can buy a hundred you become a neocloud and rent them to people who tweet about artificial general intelligence coming in eighteen months.
This is the same economic model as tool rental except the tools cost sixty thousand dollars and the guy renting them uses them to generate affiliate marketing blog posts about air fryers.
The researcher identified the neoclouds. All 300 of them. That's the whole story. Someone made a list. Financial journalists saw the list and decided this was a headline. It is not a headline. It's a spreadsheet with a press release attached.
The implication here is that GPU access has been democratized. That's the word they use. Democratized. As if the founding fathers envisioned a future where every citizen has the inalienable right to spin up a H100 cluster and fine-tune a model that writes Seinfeld scripts about cryptocurrency.
Retail traders will read this and think they've discovered an arbitrage opportunity. They'll start a neocloud. They'll lease rack space in a data center outside Dallas. They'll set up a website with a gradient background and the word "scalable" in the hero text. They'll acquire exactly zero customers and shut down in four months when they realize AWS exists.
But sure. 300 neoclouds. That's one neocloud for every person who actually knows what a tensor core does.
Photo by Mariia Berezovsky on Unsplash
Leave a Comment