Nebius, Lambda and Crusoe: The Other NeocloudsNarrow moat

CoreWeave was first to the neocloud model and is comfortably the largest, taking roughly 35.4% of buyers and 50.8% of dollars in the first quarter of 2026¹. It is not alone. Nebius operates its own data centres with a developer platform alongside, Lambda targets the same AI-native customers, and Crusoe competes on an energy-led cost and sustainability proposition.

Crusoe's numbers are the most instructive in the group: about 27.7% of dollars from just 3.0% of buyers. That is a business built on very few, very large contracts — an even more concentrated version of the model CoreWeave is criticised for. It tells you something about the market's structure rather than about any one company: AI infrastructure is bought in enormous blocks by a small number of organisations, so every supplier in it ends up concentrated.

The competitive dynamic among them is mostly about capital and power access rather than technology. Everyone buys the same Nvidia silicon; the differences are how fast you can secure electricity, build the facility and finance the GPUs. CoreWeave's lead comes from having done all three earlier and at greater scale.

Watch pricing for comparable GPU capacity across providers. In a market where the product is largely identical, competition arrives as price — and CoreWeave carries the interest and depreciation load that makes price competition expensive.