Nvidia GPU access spreads beyond big clouds as neocloud providers multiply

Customers can shop for GPU access at the large clouds run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, at so-called neoclouds such as CoreWeave, through online marketplaces, or by buying the costly hardware directly.

Nvidia's business is diversifying. Five clients accounted for at least 10% of the company's accounts receivable in the July quarter, up from three in January, according to a filing. Industry research firm SemiAnalysis counted 323 Nvidia GPU providers as of September, up from 209 less than 11 months earlier. "You're going to see a whole new crop of really, really exciting neoclouds with hundreds of billions of dollars backlog together," CEO Jensen Huang said at a Goldman Sachs tech conference in San Francisco last month.

Many large companies spend tens of millions of dollars a year on a mix of cloud services from Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and since ChatGPT's 2022 launch they have increasingly turned to those hyperscalers for GPUs to run generative AI workloads. Working through a top cloud provider carries a reputational advantage: a software company that relies on Amazon and Microsoft for GPUs and other capabilities does not have to worry that prospective customers will question its suppliers. "When you're talking to enterprises, your subprocessor had better be Azure," said Bindu Reddy, CEO of the AI assistant startup Abacus, referring to Microsoft's cloud infrastructure.

In the past year the leading AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI have committed to spending more than $500 billion between Amazon and Microsoft, which controlled 59% of the cloud infrastructure market in 2025, according to industry researcher Gartner. Gartner analyst Hardeep Singh said hyperscalers are well placed to show trust to enterprises because of their decade-plus of full-stack capabilities, but they do not always have as many GPUs as enterprises require. Andy Jassy, Amazon's CEO, told analysts in July that the retailer and cloud pioneer will not be able to serve all the demand it foresees this year. "I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027," he said.

If the hyperscalers were sufficient, neoclouds would not be proliferating. Modal, a startup that runs virtual sandboxes where AI agents work independently of main IT environments, moved from running on hyperscalers to signing up with major neoclouds and now uses 25 of them, said CEO Erik Bernhardsson. "You can get a few hundred GPUs or maybe a thousand, but at our scale, we needed way more GPUs," he said. The hyperscalers are also turning to the neoclouds: Google and Microsoft have started tapping CoreWeave even as they compete with one another. Marc Boroditsky, chief revenue officer of Nebius, a Netherlands-based neocloud with U.S. operations, said some hyperscalers have approached his company about serving customers they fear they cannot support when needed.

Video generation startup Reactor uses GPUs through Nebius and hyperscalers, said CEO Alberto Taiuti. Data center location matters, he said, because Reactor wants user-created videos to appear immediately; Nebius supplies the specific GPUs Reactor needs, along with solid customer service and sufficient hardware and software, at a good price. The most visible neoclouds can require some upfront payment, and chips may not come online for months, because providers raise funding based on contracts and then set up data center equipment, Bernhardsson said. CoreWeave executive vice president Chen Goldberg said it would be difficult to hand over 10,000 GPUs to a new customer with one day's notice, and CEO Mike Intrator said on the company's August earnings call that near-term capacity remains essentially sold out.

Companies that want GPUs immediately may have to look beyond the best-known names. Some neoclouds are not household names because they target specific countries, which can be viable in certain cases. "Capacity right now is tight, and your relationships with your suppliers is actually one of the most closely guarded secrets for companies like ours," said Zhen Lu, CEO of Runpod. Specialist neoclouds can offer more flexibility than the larger GPU clouds, which often require upfront payments and long-term commitments.