Top Neocloud Stocks 2026: GPU Landlords Renting AI Compute

Even the richest companies on Earth can't build data centers fast enough. Microsoft is guiding toward $190 billion in capex for 2026. Meta could go free-cash-flow negative this year from building. And they're still short on compute.

So they rent.

That's the entire neocloud thesis in one word. A neocloud buys NVIDIA GPUs by the hundred thousand, racks them in purpose-built data centers, and rents the compute back to AI labs and hyperscalers by the hour or the decade.^[1]

Why would Microsoft, which owns Azure, rent from someone else? Accounting, mostly. Build it yourself and it's capex on your balance sheet. Rent it from a neocloud and it's an operating expense spread over the contract. Meta has up to $62 billion in neocloud agreements running through 2031–2032 for exactly this reason. The neoclouds happily absorb that capex... and the mountain of debt that comes with it. More on that mountain later.

The demand side has held up better than the "GPU glut" crowd predicted. SemiAnalysis's H100 rental index rose about 36% between May 2025 and May 2026, from roughly $1.95 to $2.65 per GPU-hour on one-year terms. Scarce capacity, seller's market.

We're slicing neocloud stocks three ways: Pure-plays (the GPU cloud operators themselves), Landlords (converted bitcoin miners who own the power and lease the shells), and Private Bellwethers (the giants you can't buy yet, but whose IPOs will reprice the whole sector).

These companies are the neocloud trade. They buy the GPUs, run the clusters, and sign the mega-contracts. When AI compute demand moves, these stocks move first, in both directions.

CoreWeaveNASDAQ: CRWV

CoreWeave is the yardstick everyone else gets measured against. Q1 2026 revenue hit $2.1 billion (up 112%), Q2 revenue doubled again, and the backlog sits around $104 billion. It runs over 1 GW of active power with 3.5 GW contracted, and it's the only GPU cloud rated Platinum by SemiAnalysis's ClusterMAX.

Now the catch. CoreWeave ended Q1 with $25.1 billion in debt plus $10 billion in lease obligations, and its Q2 net interest expense hit $640 million, growing faster than revenue. The adjusted EBITDA margin looks great at 56%; the operating margin after depreciation was roughly 1%. This is a magnificent revenue machine bolted to a debt engine. Own it for the scale; watch the interest line like a hawk.

NebiusNASDAQ: NBIS

Nebius is what happens when a company gets a second life. Spun out of Russia's Yandex with a clean balance sheet and an Amsterdam HQ, it's now the fastest-growing name in the group: Q2 2026 revenue of $575 million, up 514%, with contract wins quadrupling. The stock roughly tripled in 2026.

The bull case is simple: CoreWeave-style growth with less leverage. Nebius has 3.5 GW of contracted power, a target of 1 GW connected by end of 2026, and long-dated deals with Meta and Microsoft running into the early 2030s, including customer backstops that reduce the build-it-and-they-don't-come risk. It's the challenger with the stronger financial position, priced accordingly.

IRENNASDAQ: IREN

IREN is the crossover story: a former bitcoin miner that completed the pivot into a vertically integrated AI cloud. It owns the land, the power, and runs the GPUs. That combination attracted the ultimate stamp of approval: NVIDIA invested $2.1 billion directly, alongside a multi-billion cloud deal, and Microsoft signed a five-year agreement worth about $9.7 billion for capacity at IREN's Texas campuses.

The company has pushed its 2026 annualized revenue run-rate target above $4 billion, roughly 85% of it under contract, with customers including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Perplexity, and Together AI. Execution is the risk: its most recent quarter showed a net loss on mining impairments and heavy AI hiring, and management is planning $25–30 billion of capex in 2027. High risk, high reward.

Converted bitcoin miners who spent years accumulating the actual scarce stuff: energized land, grid interconnections, substations. Now they lease those powered shells to AI tenants on 10–15 year contracts. Less upside than running GPUs, but the leases are long and the tenants are names like Anthropic and Amazon.

Applied DigitalNASDAQ: APLD

Applied Digital turned its North Dakota bitcoin-hosting campuses into AI real estate, signing multiple 15-year leases with CoreWeave covering 400 MW of critical IT load. It's the cleanest "picks-and-shovels behind the pure-play" trade on this list: when CoreWeave grows, Applied Digital collects rent for a decade and a half.

TeraWulfNASDAQ: WULF

TeraWulf stacked up roughly $12.8 billion in AI contracts, and the crown jewel is a ~$19 billion, 20-year agreement to provide Anthropic with about 401 MW at a converted industrial site in Kentucky, signed directly. Its earlier Fluidstack deals came with a Google backstop of $1.8 billion in lease obligations (Google took warrants for ~8% of the company). When Google guarantees your tenant's rent, financing gets a lot cheaper.

Hut 8NASDAQ: HUT

Hut 8 signed two 15-year leases at its Beacon Point campus in Texas totaling 704 MW and $19.6 billion in contracted value. Part of Anthropic's freshly announced $35 billion compute deal with Lambda reportedly runs through that very campus. Behind it sits an 8.5 GW development pipeline. Of the miner conversions, this one has the biggest land bank relative to its market cap.

Core ScientificNASDAQ: CORZ

Core Scientific is CoreWeave's biggest landlord: roughly $10–12 billion in contracted revenue across 590 MW of critical IT load at six sites, with HPC expected to drive about 70% of 2026 revenue. Shareholders rejected CoreWeave's all-stock takeover in late 2025, betting the standalone story was worth more. So far, the market agrees.

Cipher DigitalNASDAQ: CIFR

Cipher Digital rebranded from Cipher Mining in February 2026 (same CIFR ticker) to match its pivot. It has locked in 600 MW of contracted HPC capacity, split between a 15-year, 300 MW lease with AWS and a 10-year, 300 MW lease with Fluidstack and Google, roughly $8.5 billion in lease payments, plus a ~95%-owned joint venture developing a 1 GW West Texas site called Colchis. Smaller than Hut 8 and TeraWulf, which cuts both ways: more room to re-rate, less margin for a stumbled buildout.

You can't buy these yet. Watch them anyway: their funding rounds set the sector's private-market comps, and their IPOs will be the biggest neocloud catalysts of the next 12 months.

Crusoe

Crusoe is building Stargate. Literally: its 1.2 GW Abilene, Texas campus for Oracle and OpenAI is the first Stargate site, with another 900 MW at Abilene for Microsoft. Contracted AI infrastructure hit 4.9 GW across five US campuses, with a development pipeline above 40 GW. It raised $1.375 billion at a $10B+ valuation in October 2025 and was reported in July 2026 to be raising ~$3 billion at a valuation near $30 billion. IPO chatter has pointed to a listing as soon as late 2026, though no S-1 has been filed.

Lambda

Lambda is the NVIDIA-backed GPU cloud that just landed the deal of the year: Anthropic agreed to spend $35 billion on its computing capacity. Lambda expects $1.5 billion+ in 2026 revenue, raised a $1.5 billion Series E in November 2025, and is now in talks for up to $3 billion more at a $12 billion+ valuation, an unpriced round that converts at a discount to its IPO, which bankers are targeting for 2027. It hired telecom veteran Michel Combes as CEO to run the public-company playbook.

Nscale

The London-based dark horse. Nscale claims a $51 billion contracted-revenue backlog (bigger than every public name here except CoreWeave) and is reportedly preparing a US IPO as early as September 2026. If it prices well, every stock on this list re-rates. If it flops, same thing, other direction.

Two ways.

The debt trap. These companies borrow at 7–9 year payback horizons to buy GPUs that command premium pricing for maybe 2–5 years, rented under contracts that mostly run 2–3 years. That duration mismatch is the whole ballgame. CoreWeave's net interest expense grew 140% year-over-year in Q2, faster than its 112% revenue growth. Watch net interest vs. revenue growth every quarter; the moment refinancing gets expensive, equity holders eat the dilution.

The demand air pocket. The sector already wobbled twice in 2026: once when efficient Chinese open-source models raised "maybe we need less compute" fears, and again when a Wall Street Journal analysis of off-balance-sheet AI commitments knocked Nebius 14% in a morning. There's also the circularity problem: NVIDIA invests in its own customers (CoreWeave, Lambda, IREN), which flatters everyone's numbers right up until it doesn't.^[2] Watch for hyperscaler capex guidance cuts and for Meta actually launching its own compute-rental service; either one hits every name on this list at once.

The next 12–18 months are about one question: does contracted backlog become delivered, cash-flowing capacity without another mountain of debt?

Catalysts to circle:

• Nscale IPO (reportedly as early as this month) and Lambda's 2027 listing: the first true price discovery for private neocloud paper.
• CoreWeave and Nebius Q3 earnings in mid-November, where the interest-expense-vs-revenue race gets its next data point.
• IREN's 2027 capacity ramp, the test of whether a vertically integrated ex-miner can execute at hyperscaler scale.
• Hyperscaler capex guides from Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon. When the landlords' four biggest tenants sneeze, the whole sector catches pneumonia.

Directionally, we think the theme holds: the compute shortage is real, rental prices rose through 2026, and the hyperscalers keep signing decade-long checks. But the basket is uneven. Separate the operators from the landlords, size positions by delivery risk, and never forget that in this sector, the backlog is the promise; the debt is the fact.