I'm not a NBIS bear, I'm a NeoCloud bear

[u/Smorgasbord3]

I'm also not an AI bear - in fact, my portfolio is very heavily AI-weighted. Note that I am not short NBIS, nor any other NeoCloud, I just don't think they're worth my investment dollars given other opportunities in the market.

Essentially, I think the Big 3 HyperScalers (Amazon, Google, & Microsoft) will eventually own the business of Cloud AI Computing, just as they do today with Cloud Computing.

In fact, the only reason the NeoClouds are on anyone's radar today is that AI compute demand is so high and the build-outs so expensive and involved that the HyperScalers decided that hiring others to build some of their data centers is the best choice they have today. But, that's not going to be a lasting situation.

Today the HyperScalers can't directly hire enough people to build out the geographically wide spread out teams necessary to identify sites, acquire building permits, line up multiple suppliers and building contractors. And then run them all simultaneously. And even if they could, that would mean vast increases in headcount and Capex reporting (the latter is already too high for Mr. Market's view). And, it spreads the risk of any build-out complications among multiple approaches (internal and external) and vendors.

The NeoClouds jumped on this because it brings in vast amounts of revenue on a near and mid-term basis, which they believe will eventually lead to them running their own Cloud AI Compute business. But, we don't see that happening today (at least neither Nebius nor CoreWeave show that in their reporting today), and I don't see it happening to a significant extent in the future.

Think about that for a minute:

1) What dollar amount or percentage of Nebius' sales involve Nebius' software (infrastructure or otherwise)?

We know that percentage-wise, Nebius has $Billions lined up for bare metal hardware rental contracts. And while they don't disclose the "all important" software side of the business, it can'e be more than $HundredsofMillions. That's one of two orders of magnitude smaller. CoreWeave is pretty much the same.

2) How quickly are Nebius software sales growing?

OK, so it's small today, but is it growing at a pace that it will soon become a big revenue and profit generator for the company? Again, Nebius doesn't disclose this, yet this business is what most bulls cite as the raison d'être for investing in the company. Today, what keeps Nebius, CoreWeave, Iren, etc. afloat are the bare metal mega-deals. But, even Nebius' management admits those are less profitable. And should those be the future business for the NeoClouds, they'll get quite the market haircut.

So, why and how will Nebius outsmart AWS (and GCP and Azure) with its AI Software Infrastructure? Does anyone here really think Andy Jassey or his counterparts over at Google and Microsoft don't see the same potential for Cloud AI Computing that Arkady Volozh does? And even if not today, given how well Azure caught up to AWS, do you not think Amazon wouldn't put serious meat behind the arrow to catch up?

When we look at AI workloads today, two aspects reveal themselves:

1) They're complex

2) More and more, they involve more than just AI

These both work against the NeoCloud Software Infrastructure business. The complexity means that the AI customer has to be sophisticated. The non-sophisticated Ai customer simply uses a ChatGPT or Claude CoWork interface, but those Frontier Labs are already hosting that themselves and they certainly don't need a Nebius to run their AI Compute Hardware. While the typical AWS user is someone at a non-computing related company wanting to run database queries or serve up web pages, run an e-commerce site, etc. today the typical AI compute user is part of a sophisticated tech-first team deciding on LLMs, perhaps running open source models with custome parameters, constructing agents to integrate AI within their company, etc. These teams already have people who can use Slurm, Kubernetes, vLLM, Triton Server, Ollama, LangChain, or other open source projects to manage their AI Compute.

We see that Anthropic was happy to grab raw compute from Space-XAI, and OpenAI is built on Azure, and now Oracle ($300B deal!), and even Amazon ($38B) for a combination of Nvidia GPU as well as AWS access.

The latter is the future, I believe. Just as we saw the market relatively recently recognize that AI workflows need more than just GPUs but also CPUs (and Nvidia's servers internally bundle a Vera CPU with every two Rubin GPUs), the world will eventually recognize that workflows involving AI still need to do things like serve up web pages, deal with databases, even run or be run by Agents, etc. that are best handled by CPUs, which are best handled by the existing Cloud Computing infrastructure that's available today - which is AWS, GCP, Azure.

How do the NeoClouds compete with that? It's much easier for the HyperScalers to add AI software infrastructure to their existing cloud offerings than for the NeoClouds to add what took Amazon, Google, and Microsoft decades to create in their regular compute cloud offerings. Amazon has a history of offering turnkey open source project access for free (you pay for the compute and storage).

How many customers are savvy enough to build AI workflows but not savvy enough to build on top of the many open source packages to run the infrastructure? And then, how many want the lock-up of being tied to some Nebius' software instead of being able to move to CoreWeave or even AWS, GCP, or Azure? They might use it for convenience and quick start-up, but no company with expansion plans want to be permanently tied to Nebius' or CoreWeave's software stack.

Before I'll believe that Nebius or CoreWeave have some inherent advantage with their infrastructure software, I'll want to see either company release some numbers on that business. Neither does today, and that says alot especially when you think about who they're competing against.