Definition
Neocloud is a term from the AI era for a new generation of cloud providers focused on GPU capacity for AI training and inference. The word was popularized by the semiconductor industry research firm SemiAnalysis in 2024 reports.
How it works
A neocloud deploys large numbers of GPU servers in its own or leased IDC facilities and rents them out as bare-metal or virtualized instances, billed by the hour, usually with a thin platform layer for cluster management and scheduling that helps customers scale quickly.
Usage
Typical customers are startups training large models, inference workloads that need burst capacity, and research teams unwilling to wait in hyperscale cloud quota queues; hourly GPU pricing is the core competitive metric for these providers.
Related and confusable terms
A neocloud is still a form of cloud computing, but it does not chase the everything-store service catalog of AWS — it focuses on GPUs. The physical facilities it depends on are IDCs, and the GPU hardware stack behind it belongs to infrastructure and GPUs.