Neocloud
A neocloud is a cloud provider built around renting GPU capacity for AI, rather than offering the broad range of services of a hyperscaler such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda, Crusoe and Nscale are the largest.
Rated neocloud financings backed by a compute contract
| CoreWeave DDTL 4.0, $8.5B (March 2026) | A3 (Moody’s); six-year take-or-pay, customer reported to be Meta |
| Nscale Ward County DDTL, $1.85B (August 2026) | Baa1 (Moody’s); six-year take-or-pay with a hyperscaler |
| Lambda Term Loan B, $926M (August 2026) | Baa2 (Moody’s); take-or-pay capacity for NVIDIA in Quebec |
From our Rated GPU Financings tracker, which links each agency release.
How it works
GPUs by the hour or by the contract. A neocloud rents bare-metal GPU clusters on demand or, for most financed capacity, on multi-year reserved contracts to AI labs, hyperscalers and enterprises. Reserved contracts are usually take-or-pay (compute offtake agreements).
Financed against the contract. The GPUs are bought with debt sized to the offtake, often in a bankruptcy-remote SPV. CoreWeave’s $8.5 billion DDTL 4.0, backed by a six-year take-or-pay contract reported to be with Meta, was rated A3 by Moody’s while CoreWeave itself carries a Ba3 corporate family rating (Rated GPU Financings).
Neighbors sell the same capacity: sovereign AI clouds run by telcos and states, AI factories, former bitcoin miners and energy-backed operators. Our list of neocloud providers names them by region.
What lenders check
The offtaker repays the loan. In most neocloud financings the customer contract, not the company, is the repayment source, so lenders read the buyer’s credit and its termination rights first (Offtaker Credit Score).
Concentration and correlation are the core risks: one or two buyers, and GPUs that lose value fastest in the same market that would push a weak buyer to walk. See the risks in GPU-backed lending, ranked, and the public defaults and distress cases.
Discuss a transaction
Send us the equipment list and the loan or lease you have in mind. We will come back with an indication and the questions we would need answered.
Prefer email? hello@amcompute.com
Questions
- Which are the largest neoclouds?
- CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda, Crusoe and Nscale, by the size of their public financings in our GPU Financing Tracker.
- Has a neocloud defaulted?
- We found no public default or foreclosure on a GPU-backed neocloud loan as of October 2026. The nearest cases are bitcoin miners’ 2022 equipment loans and AI customers that stopped paying for compute (every public case).