Weekly|Neocloud Financing, META, SPCX & BE, MSFT & NOW, OCP, DeepSeek, AI Storage

It’s probably an understatement to call the last week a train wreck for AI infra trades. According to Goldman Sachs, global hedge funds had one of their worst days on Thursday as semi/infra longs sold off while popular shorts squeezed higher. During our Weekly Call on Wednesday, we shared our takeaway from investor conversation after Anthropic’s numbers, which was unanimously poor. Across our conversations, the implied revenue run rate fell short of expectations, some investors cut exposure, and there was little appetite to defend the AI trade. Subsequent company conversations sounded more optimistic, but offered no quantifiable update to establish a reacceleration into year end. The problem for investors is the lack of a credible basis for underwriting next year’s growth. With that said, Opus 5.5 has been widely approved by users since launch with stronger adoption, and we would continue to monitor the progress.

CDS concerns add another dimension: near-term cash coverage can coexist with doubts about debt repayment and business-model visibility several years out. We do not think Anthropic’s numbers alone establish that the AI infrastructure thesis has broken. GPU rental pricing remains a more important test. Neolabs have been significant incremental buyers of on-demand neocloud capacity; if their next funding rounds become harder to secure, that pressure can feed directly into rental demand and pricing. Our Microsoft work also points to rising neocloud financing costs improving Azure’s relative position. We discussed this link between Neolab funding, GPU rental demand and neocloud pricing on our Wednesday weekly call.

This week’s earnings underline why revenue growth and funding need to be assessed together. Meta’s revenue and Muse commentary were encouraging, but higher capex and financing plans increased valuation pressure. SPCX’s compute-led beat came with expansion ambitions that require substantial external funding. Bloom Energy beat and raised guidance, yet negative operating cash flow and rising receivables weighed on the shares. Strong demand still has to turn into cash.

Our latest enterprise work shows that most companies in the latest six-company survey expect slower AI spending growth as procurement, model routing and ROI controls improve. We believe this actually aligns with our view that incumbent enterprise SaaS platforms’ AI products are gaining ground, including MSFT Copilot and NOW Assist. At the same time, our OCP checks and memory research still show demand pressing against physical constraints. We remain constructive on optical interconnects and AI storage, while watching funding availability, rental pricing and the conversion of installed capacity into revenue.

This Week’s Reports

MSFT: Copilot deployment broadens and Azure pricing improves. Our checks point to continued enterprise Copilot expansion, M365 Commercial Cloud growth of 18% and Azure growth of 47%, both above the high end of guidance.

NOW: solid checks, with AICT moving into evaluations. We expect a solid beat to 3Q cRPO and 4Q guidance, while AI Control Tower is progressing into live pilots and governance work with a limited near-term revenue contribution.

OCP: larger clusters expand optical demand and raise deployment requirements. Our two field reports examine NPO versus CPO, copper replacement, the 800 VDC roadmap and the longer runway for single-phase cold plates, with testing and facility readiness increasingly important to delivery.

Enterprise AI Survey, Vol. 6: more usage does not guarantee faster spending growth. Our six-company sample shows tighter ROI requirements, cheaper model routing and self-hosting moderating spending growth, even as production use expands.

DeepSeek: V4.1-Flash-1017 reaches the leading open-weight tier. We see a compelling capability-cost balance for coding and agents, while the gap to proprietary leaders and the lack of like-for-like independent testing warrant caution on headline benchmark comparisons.

Premium Report Snapshot

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