US-based CoreWeave started publicly trading on the American stock exchange Nasdaq last year in March. By raising $1.5 billion in its share sale, at the time it became the biggest tech IPO in the US since 2021. The company is part of a wave of large infrastructure players now being called neoclouds.

Broadly speaking, neocloud companies are cloud providers that specialise in supporting AI workloads by offering compute infrastructure in the form of GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS). In India too, the neocloud market is seeing significant growth.

Players like Yotta Data Services, NxtGen, NeevCloud, and E2E Networks are some of the noteworthy names that are vying for the neocloud opportunity.

GPUs or graphic processing units are central to the AI revolution with foundational and large language models (LLMs) and AI applications all requiring GPU compute power and high bandwidth memory.

The opportunity is ripe for neocloud companies as the world faces disruption from AI, growing demand-supply gap for GPUs, supply chain bottlenecks, and cost efficiency as compared to traditional hyperscalers.

Neoclouds started appearing more prominently between 2023-2024. According to realty market research group JLL, the neocloud segment has seen a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in revenue of 82% since 2021.

For over a decade, hyperscalers have been central to India’s cloud adoption, offering elastic compute largely optimised for IT and tech workloads. But as AI moved from experimentation to real-world deployment, cracks began to appear in the form of advanced GPU scarcity, often considered the foundational backbone.

According to industry executives, hyperscalers, constrained by capex cycles and limited GPU supply, have increasingly rationed advanced capacity. Neoclouds help bridge a gap by providing accessible,........

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