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Sunday, November 1, 2026

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Thoughts on Elon's recent neocloud comments "Neocloud" has always been a weak label. These businesses aren't really clouds, and they aren't particularly new. The more accurate term is GPU VPS. Most of them rent bare-metal GPUs. They generally don't offer redundancy across three availability zones, and they don't sell hundreds of platform services on top of the hardware the way a true cloud does. That puts them closer to VPS providers than to cloud platforms. CPU history shows the difference. CPU cloud concentrated among three to five players because platform services lock customers in and drive a demand flywheel. Customers use more of the stack over time, rather than only renting the hardware. That is how AWS-style clouds kept high margins and strong moats. CPU VPS went the other way: many providers selling essentially the same product, in a brutally competitive, commoditized market. If GPU supply stops being constrained by chips or energy, GPU VPS starts to look like CPU VPS, with gross margins of something like 50%. Better marketing and operations can lift margins and grow revenue, but they won't push gross margins to 75-80%. That is the long-term risk Musk pointed to when he predicted most neoclouds would go out of business. Most of these names are VPS businesses earning cloud-like profits and valuations from a temporary imbalance between supply and demand. $CRWV is part of that group. CoreWeave and $NBIS are also the two furthest from a pure GPU VPS, because both already sell platform services on top of the GPUs. CoreWeave is still the most exposed on financing. It pushed hard to maximize margins on each contract and took on interest-rate risk against fixed contracted revenue. Its counterparties, OpenAI, $MSFT and $META, may have played those deals more intelligently. So CRWV is the most vulnerable name on its balance sheet, yet one of the least commodity-like on product. That gap is where the return potential sits for investors willing to stick with CRWV.
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Spirit's data auction shows what office AI is missing. Google ($GOOGL) opened at $5m and was selected at $10m for Spirit Airlines' internal data in August. Mercor was the $7.5m backup. Then micro1 proposed $12.5m. The sale still awaits court approval, with a hearing scheduled for November 6. The material includes emails, Teams conversations and business records. Google's counsel confirmed that it wants the data for AI training. I think this competition for records of real work will keep pushing up the value of enterprise data. This fits our earlier argument about why coding agents advanced faster than office automation. Coding has public repositories and tests that provide fast feedback. In office work, the context behind a decision is often scattered across private documents and conversations. Knowing how to use a spreadsheet is only part of the job. Knowing why an exception was approved, and what happened afterward, is much harder to learn from the public internet. My read is that Google is preparing for that gap. Internal records could help models learn how work moves through an organization, provided those records can be turned into tasks with outcomes that can be checked. Also it remains an open opportunity for $MNDY https://t.co/Rmzyg6DE0y, and other AI-native productivity startups to tacle. Gemini 4 Carbon already leads Artificial Analysis' AutomationBench-AA, which tests simulated workflows across business applications. Google is competitive in the kind of work this data could help models learn. Anthropic's IPO filing also puts adoption in perspective. As of September, over 50% of the Fortune 500 generated at least $100,000 each in trailing-year revenue for Anthropic. Among the publicly listed customers in that group, spending on Anthropic averaged under 0.1% of total expenses in 3Q26. We still think enterprise AI is falling short on office automation. Having access to a model tells us little about how much work a company can delegate to it. I find Google's enterprise opportunity more compelling over time than Meta's emphasis on personal AI. Google already has Workspace and Cloud as routes to customers. If better training on real work makes its models reliable enough to complete office tasks, it has a way to sell that capability. The unlock still requires models that can carry a task through the office environment with limited supervision. That remains some distance away. I think acquiring real work histories now could be a fruitful long-term bet for Google.

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When the liquidity does not add up

Arbor Realty Trust’s dividend suspension is presented as creating $60 million of liquidity, raising questions about its ability to meet…

ABR $2.2B
John Hempton's Newsletter 3 clicks

FTAI 3Q26: Aero margins in focus

FTAI’s Aerospace Products margin rebounded to 31% as CFM56 module output rose, while Power deposits and contracted deliveries fund its 2027…

FTAI $16B
Stock Thoughts 4 clicks
PSN · long

Parsons CORP

Parsons generates roughly half of its $6.4 billion revenue from Federal Solutions, serving defense and intelligence customers.

PSN $5.4B
Value Investors Club

Another Haircut with Avy the Barber

SoFi’s stock case hinges on interest rates, tangible book value and private-credit loan sales after its $1.5 billion equity offering.

SOFI $22B
WHAT ARE WE DOING? “Contrarians At The Gate” 3 clicks

Twilio CEO: ‘Buy the dip!’

Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler urged investors to “buy the dip” after earnings sent the software maker’s shares down 17% after hours.

TWLO $39B
The Technology Letter 2 clicks

CoStar: 3Q26 Business Recap

CoStar’s 3Q26 revenue growth slowed to 14% as bookings fell to $37 million, while cost cuts lifted EBIT margin to 8.8%.

CSGP $12B
Speedwell Memos 3 clicks

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