Specialized / Developer & Managed-Hosting Cloud

Nvidia has held talks with insurance companies about shifting part of the financing risk tied to its chips as the chipmaker seeks to expand demand beyond major technology companies, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. The discussions include potential insurance for loans extended to smaller "neocloud" companies, which could protect lenders if a borrower defaults and Nvidia chips pledged as collateral cannot be resold for enough to cover the debt, the FT reported, citing people familiar with the talks. The discussions are at an early stage and may not result in any deals. The move is part of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's broader push to make chips and AI infrastructure easier for outside investors to finance, with Huang arguing that chips should be viewed as an "investable asset class" similar to other expensive, long-lived technology assets. Nvidia has shared data on chip depreciation and the expected future value of computing power with at least one insurer, and is also working with broker Howden Re on a structure involving insurers, while exploring the use of insurance groups to syndicate risk to hedge funds and other alternative investors, with the potential size of deals possibly exceeding the balance sheets of even large insurers. The insurance push comes after Nvidia offered to backstop part of financing deals designed to unlock $500 billion of capital from Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs and Apollo, and after the company separately announced a record $150 billion share buyback on Monday.

Akamai Technologies announced in September 2026 that Anthropic has committed US$11.60 billion over seven years to use Akamai Cloud's distributed AI infrastructure, an agreement that could expand to about US$20.00 billion and comes with warrants for Anthropic to acquire up to roughly 5% of Akamai's equity through non-voting convertible preferred shares. The long-term AI infrastructure partnership sits alongside Akamai's 2027 earnings guidance of approximately US$150 million to US$300 million, which already reflects pressure from higher capital spending and investment in cloud and AI infrastructure. The deal is far more central to Akamai's growth narrative than its recent security and AI security partnerships with NVIDIA and Deloitte, because it directly links billions of US dollars of future spend to the company's AI infrastructure buildout. It also intensifies Akamai's biggest current risk: heavy capital spending and customer concentration tied to a single AI partner. Akamai's narrative projects US$6.0 billion in revenue and US$659.8 million in earnings by 2029, while some analysts assume about US$6.3 billion of revenue and US$961 million of earnings by 2029.

British AI neocloud Nscale has secured $3.36 billion in convertible financing ahead of its IPO later this year. The round is led by hedge fund Third Point and includes $2.36 billion available immediately plus an additional $1 billion from existing investor Nvidia, which Nscale will receive in mid-November. The notes will convert into equity shares once the IPO is completed. Nscale filed its IPO paperwork last week and is expected to be valued at $35 billion on the NYSE, seeking to raise $3 billion in the offering. Since being spun out of Australian cryptocurrency mining company Arkon Energy two years ago, Nscale has amassed over $103 billion worth of contracts, and is developing large data center campuses including in Norway and West Virginia.

Akamai Technologies surged 21.3% in premarket trading after announcing a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud services commitment from AI company Anthropic, designed to support Anthropic's growing CPU workload demands across Akamai Cloud's distributed infrastructure. The deal includes provisions allowing the relationship to expand by up to an additional $9 billion, potentially taking the total commitment to about $20 billion, and Akamai also disclosed a hardware supply agreement with Lenovo and authorized contract manufacturer Jabil to procure about $1.7 billion in memory components. People Incorporated rose 6.5% in premarket trading after The Wall Street Journal reported that MGM Resorts International is weighing a potential takeover bid for Barry Diller's media conglomerate, with an offer potentially coming within days, just one day after People Incorporated withdrew its own $48.30-per-share cash proposal to acquire MGM's remaining public shares. Select Water Solutions rose 5.5% after announcing a definitive agreement to acquire Pilot Water Solutions for $700 million, plus up to $15 million in potential contingent consideration, in a transaction including $600 million in cash and $100 million in Class A common stock. Prime Medicine climbed 11.7% in after-hours trading to $3.49 after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared its Investigational New Drug application for PM647, an investigational in vivo Prime Editor designed to correct the E342K mutation in the SERPINA1 gene, the root cause of Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency, paving the way for a global first-in-human Phase 1/2 clinical trial. On the downside, Comcast slipped 1.6% in premarket trading to $21.77 after KeyBanc downgraded the stock to Underweight from Sector Weight with an $18 price target, Twilio fell 3.7% after HSBC downgraded it to Reduce from Hold with a $211 price target, Zscaler fell 3.6% after naming Ross Tackett Chief Revenue Officer effective Oct. 1, succeeding Mike Rich, and Scholastic tumbled 11% after reporting fiscal first-quarter 2027 results that missed expectations, with revenue down 3.9% year over year to $216.8 million and an adjusted loss per share of $3.63.

Nebius Group will raise its Nvidia GPU rates by roughly 17 to 21 percent and its AMD EPYC Genoa CPU service rates by 25 percent beginning October 1, citing continued demand for computing capacity and limited computing resources. The price increase, which the company said should translate into higher revenue beginning in the fourth quarter, came alongside a BNP Paribas price target hike of 53 percent to $399 from $260, with the rating raised to outperform from neutral. Nebius shares rose 7.44 percent on Thursday to close at $243.48 apiece. In the second quarter, the company swung to a net loss of $190.4 million from a $502.5 million net income a year earlier, while adjusted net loss narrowed by 64 percent to $33.2 million from $91.5 million, and revenues jumped by 454 percent to $582.3 million from $105.1 million. Hedge fund holdings in the stock more than tripled to $8.28 billion from $2.36 billion quarter-on-quarter, with 86 funds holding positions, up from 60 in the first quarter.

Palantir Technologies and Nebius Group announced a strategic partnership on September 8 to bring Nebius's AI-native compute infrastructure into Palantir's commercial platform. Palantir designated Nebius as its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner, integrating Nebius compute and inference endpoints directly inside the Palantir enterprise perimeter. The alliance allows commercial clients to deploy open AI models and run compute-heavy workloads while maintaining strict control over proprietary data, and the companies will also collaborate on modular data center deployments to rapidly scale compute capacity where power is available. For Palantir, the deal provides dedicated high-performance compute capacity supporting its rapid U.S. commercial expansion and 157% net dollar retention rate, while for Nebius it validates its full-stack AI cloud infrastructure and unlocks direct access to Palantir's enterprise customer base. The partnership carries execution and capital risks for both sides, with Palantir facing higher hosting and delivery expenses and Nebius remaining subject to persistent EBIT losses and negative free cash flow as it aggressively builds out data centers and acquires GPUs.

Akamai shares surged about 13% in after-hours trading after Anthropic struck a $12 billion deal with the company for AI computing, with Akamai also discussing longer-term capital expenditure plans. The move made Akamai the biggest after-hours mover, climbing roughly 14%. In the regular session, Oracle fell 3.5% after sending a force majeure notice to a project developer, a unit of Blue Owl Capital, regarding a massive data center being built in New Mexico, a step tied to meeting power commitments that could delay rent for Oracle even as it would still owe the rent for the full lease term once payments begin. GoDaddy rose about 4.6% after the Financial Times reported that Gen Digital, the maker of Norton 360 antivirus, made an offer for the company in a deal that would roll up a number of major legacy software brands, though the talks are in early stages and may not lead to a deal; Gen Digital shares fell more than 12%. MGM Resorts dropped 11% after Barry Diller's People Inc dropped plans to acquire the rest of the casino giant, with Diller saying the mix was not coming together as hoped. Everpure was the top S&P 500 gainer, closing up about 11% after the data storage company forecast 2028 revenue above the average analyst estimate, drawing price target hikes from Citi to 160 from 130 a share and from B of A to 180 from 150 a share.

Crusoe and Thinking Machines Lab have announced a $65 million annual agreement to power inference for the lab's open models on Crusoe Cloud. Under the deal, Thinking Machines Lab will run a range of production workloads, including its Inkling models, GLM 5.2 and 5.3, and its own fine-tuned variants, through Crusoe Managed Inference on a dedicated Tailored Deployment of NVIDIA HGX B200 systems connected with NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. Crusoe will run and support the cluster directly as a Tailored Deployment, a dedicated, benchmarked, SLA-backed endpoint, giving Thinking Machines Lab the price-performance and headroom to scale without managing its own inference stack. The companies are also looking to expand into batch inference for large-scale synthetic data generation. Thinking Machines Lab joins a roster that has taken Crusoe Managed Inference past $100 million in contracted ARR less than a year from launch.

Rackspace Technology, Inc. announced in September 2026 that it had joined the NVIDIA Cloud Partner Program, enhancing its ability to deliver NVIDIA accelerated computing and governed AI cloud services for regulated and sovereign enterprises. A key outcome of the move is Rackspace's Institutional Sovereign Pod, which combines NVIDIA Blackwell, Palantir Foundry and AIP in a governed environment intended to keep enterprise data, models and AI operations under tighter control. The partnership follows the June 2026 announcement of a 30 MW AMD Instinct GPU build out in Rackspace data centers, and together the two moves frame a bolder AI infrastructure story for the company. Rackspace's narrative projects $2.8 billion revenue and $218.6 million earnings by 2029, requiring 1.1% yearly revenue growth and a $364.6 million earnings increase from -$146.0 million today, with a $4.90 fair value implying 21% upside. Some of the lowest ranked analysts had assumed only about 1.5% annual revenue growth and continued losses, warning that automation could shrink Rackspace's managed services opportunity even as the NVIDIA partnership might prompt them to revisit those pessimistic views.

Cloudflare shares jumped 6.8% in the afternoon session after the company announced the general availability of Python Workers on its global developer platform. The company said on its engineering blog that Python is now a fully supported, first-class language on its edge runtime, enabling developers to natively run web frameworks such as FastAPI and Django alongside AI libraries like LangChain without custom glue code. The update targets agentic artificial-intelligence workloads by embedding socket-level networking that connects external model APIs and serverless inference directly into Cloudflare's distributed network. The launch deepens Cloudflare's positioning in automated software workflows, following management's second-quarter earnings disclosure that non-human requests now account for more than 50% of network traffic. The stock also benefited as the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield fell roughly 3 basis points to 4.97%, slipping below the 5% threshold, and as attention turned to a U.S.–China summit later in the week slated to cover trade relations and artificial intelligence cooperation. Cloudflare is up 77.2% since the beginning of the year, and at $347.27 per share, it has set a new 52-week high.

DigitalOcean Holdings reported quarterly revenue above analyst expectations and lifted its full-year EPS guidance, sending the stock up 12.31% in a single day. The earnings update followed the company's securing of a new US$725 million equipment finance facility to support capacity expansion for its AI-Native Cloud platform. At a share price of US$146.16, DigitalOcean Holdings has delivered a 1-year total shareholder return of 287.59%, though its 90-day share price return declined 7.01%. Analysts see a fair value of about $178.77 per share, while the current P/E of 73.1x sits well above the US IT industry on 21.5x and peers on 50.3x. The company released over 60 new products and features in the quarter, which it says is expanding its addressable market and driving higher incremental annual recurring revenue.

Internet Thailand Public Company Limited, or INET, has reported a favourable earnings outlook for the third quarter of 2026, driven by its Cloud and Data Center businesses. Wallchai Vechcheewadamrong, Deputy Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer, told Than Hoon that the main driver is the Sovereign Cloud trend, which has prompted government agencies and organisations to migrate their systems back from foreign cloud providers such as AWS to INET in significant numbers. The main customer groups moving back include public health agencies, security-related agencies, and legal organisations, generating a large volume of orders. Revenue is expected to be recognised gradually in proportion to the systems that actually complete migration, making revenue growth stand out in the fourth quarter of 2026 and continue into early next year. The company is therefore confident that 2026 revenue will grow in line with its target of 3,500 to 3,600 million baht. INET has also benefited from the hardware shortage, having stockpiled a large amount of hardware in advance when prices were still low, while competitors lack sufficient hardware, prompting new customers and competitors' existing customers to move to INET's Cloud services. INET currently runs about 100,000 VMI of active servers and can expand its hardware capacity to support 180,000 to 210,000 VMI, with 150,000 VMI expected to be in service in 2026. In its Cloud Data Center business, INET currently operates three facilities: two urban data centers with combined electricity usage of 4 megawatts, and one data center in Saraburi province with combined electricity usage of 8 megawatts. A fourth data center in Khon Kaen province, also with combined electricity usage of 8 megawatts, is under development but has been temporarily suspended pending clear resolutions and legal conditions from the Data Center board, pushing construction back to the third quarter of 2026 from the second quarter of 2026, with full long-term operation planned for 2028. The company still faces pressure, however, from the government's plan to raise electricity rates for data centers. The company would like to propose that the state separate electricity rates for foreign operators and Thai providers. If it has to bear higher electricity costs, it may need to raise service fees, which would affect Thai customers.

DigitalOcean Holdings secured a $725 million equipment finance facility on September 10 to fund the GPU and CPU capacity its AI-Native Cloud business needs, sending the stock up 7.45%. The facility, arranged with MUFG Bank as lead administrative and collateral agent alongside Axos Bank, BMO Bank and Wells Fargo as joint lead arrangers and PNC Bank as document agent, matures on September 10, 2030, and carries an accordion option for another $300 million. CFO Matt Steinfort described the financing as a way to align cash outflows with revenue at an attractive cost of capital, raised from a position of strength. The move follows second-quarter results reported on August 4, when DigitalOcean posted revenue growth of 29% year over year and raised its full-year outlook on accelerating AI demand. Remaining performance obligations reached $894 million in the second quarter, up twelvefold from a year earlier, while AI customer ARR grew 212% year over year and customers spending $500,000 or more grew their revenue contribution 160%. The expansion has come at a cost: operating income fell 18%, operating margin slipped to 10%, net income dropped 4% to $35 million, and adjusted free cash flow margin narrowed from 26% to 22%.

Nebius Group has raised prices for its Nvidia GPU and AMD CPU cloud services, citing surging enterprise interest in large-scale AI training and inference workloads. The higher rates apply to both Nvidia GPU instances and AMD CPU based compute bundles across the company's AI focused cloud offerings, with the price change taking effect on October 1. The company said the move reflects strong AI workloads filling its infrastructure and tight supply of high end chips such as Nvidia H100 and B300, and that steeper rates on GPUs and AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs help align customer bills with the cost of scarce compute capacity and large data center buildouts. Nebius Group builds full stack infrastructure for AI developers and enterprises across the US, the UK, and other markets, so the pricing directly shapes what customers pay to train and run models at scale. Investors will watch upcoming quarterly updates for the AI cloud revenue mix and Palantir related usage, since stable or growing GPU utilization at the new rates would show the higher pricing is being absorbed rather than pushing workloads to rival providers.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said hyperscalers are "always almost wrong" on AI capacity planning because they set infrastructure plans once a year while demand shifts far faster, and he is pushing a network of nimble regional clouds as the fix. Speaking at the All-In Summit, Huang said Nvidia would be happy with five hyperscalers but argued the industry ultimately needs 50, 100 or even 1,000 neoclouds, since regional providers can move quickly to secure land, power and existing facilities that are harder for companies operating from Silicon Valley or Seattle to coordinate globally. Nvidia is building what Huang described as a large-scale distributed network of companies securing those critical resources, and he pointed to activity in Australia and Southeast Asia where Nvidia is helping bring additional gigawatts of capacity online through regional cloud partners. The strategy matters for Nvidia because it does not need every AI workload to run through a handful of hyperscalers if it can help create hundreds of smaller customers that collectively consume massive amounts of Nvidia hardware. It also reinforces a broader shift in the AI infrastructure trade, where the bottleneck is increasingly not who has the best chips but who can secure the electricity, land and data center capacity needed to deploy them.

HIVE Digital Technologies subsidiary BUZZ High Performance Computing Inc. has entered a strategic partnership with Vancouver-based applied-AI and data engineering company ProCogia, the companies said Wednesday. Under the agreement, ProCogia will procure dedicated GPU capacity from BUZZ HPC's Canadian data centers and layer its applied-AI stack, including LLM hosting, bespoke model training, agentic systems and vertical AI products, on top of that infrastructure for enterprise and small- and medium-sized business clients in Canada, the United States and Europe. ProCogia is deploying dedicated compute on BUZZ HPC's infrastructure while becoming a preferred applied-AI services partner for BUZZ HPC's customers, with plans to co-sell into the U.S. and Europe. ProCogia will use the partnership as a cloud launchpad for its proprietary ZeroBoxx AI framework, and its vertical AI products, CallYeah, a voice-AI solution for healthcare providers, and PolyKode, a code-migration LLM for regulated environments, will run on BUZZ HPC capacity as anchor workloads. Aydin Kilic, CEO of HIVE Digital Technologies, said BUZZ HPC was built so that Canadian companies with real AI ambition would never have to choose between accelerated computing infrastructure and sovereignty over their data, while ProCogia Founder and CEO Meharpratap Singh said the partnership addresses what has historically been the biggest bottleneck for smaller SMB and mid-market clients.

Cirrascale Cloud Services announced the production release of the Cirrascale Inference Platform, a complete software stack for enterprise-grade AI inference, at the AI Infra Summit in Santa Clara. The platform lets enterprises run open-source models, their own private models, and closed model ecosystems from a single serverless platform, including Google Gemini delivered on premises through Google Distributed Cloud and operated by Cirrascale. Its model and hardware selection layer automatically routes each request to the right model and runs it on the best available accelerator across NVIDIA, AMD, Tenstorrent, and Qualcomm with no code changes required to switch, and teams can fine-tune models on their own private data without that data leaving their environment. The platform includes a turnkey private chat experience connected to a company knowledge base, built-in controls to manage AI spend across teams, and governance guardrails for agentic workloads, aligned with HIPAA, SOC 2, and FedRAMP requirements where required. The Cirrascale Inference Platform is available now across Cirrascale's U.S. and international regions.

Cloudflare now sees agentic artificial intelligence as a growth opportunity that will dwarf its previous drivers, and has raised its long-term "North Star" growth target to 50% from 40%. Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert, speaking at an investor event, said the company's network architecture is positioned to support low-latency, secure and distributed AI inference workloads, and that Cloudflare expects to exit the year with momentum toward that objective. Demand is showing up through the Workers developer platform, where the company added 2 million developers quarter over quarter, and through variable consumption revenue, with companies including Lovable, Figma, Anthropic and OpenAI building on Workers; Cloudflare estimates that about 80% of significant AI enterprise infrastructure customers use its services. Seifert said Cloudflare is focused on inference rather than training the largest models, and that capital expenditures could rise but any increase would be expected to coincide with higher revenue. The company is also building monetization infrastructure for the agentic economy, including "pay per crawl," a Monetization Gateway, Cloudflare Wallets and identity tools, working with partners including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal and Coinbase, though Seifert acknowledged that significant technical work remains and that Cloudflare cannot yet process transactions at the millions-per-second scale it believes may be necessary.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed concerns that the chip giant is fueling its own demand by financing the companies and infrastructure projects that deploy its technology, telling Goldman Sachs' Communacopia + Technology Conference on Thursday, "Is that circular? If that is, let's do more of that." Pressed by Goldman Sachs analyst Jim Schneider on Nvidia's guarantees and financial backing for AI labs and cloud providers, Huang pointed to the $500 billion infrastructure financing platform Nvidia launched with six financial institutions including BlackRock to mobilize third-party capital, and said Nvidia commits relatively little of its own money, adding, "We put in one and 100 comes back in." Huang said Nvidia can see around $100 billion of contracted customer demand behind the projects it helps finance, describing it as "lined-up contracts" and "real stuff," and called the strategy necessary to build a global network of newer cloud providers that serve as distribution channels for Nvidia's architecture. Nvidia disclosed $99 billion of equity investments as of July 26 and another $25 billion of future investment commitments, including a $2 billion investment in cloud provider CoreWeave in January, and has agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion so OpenAI can lease an Ohio data center campus that will run on Nvidia chips, with total guarantees potentially reaching $108.5 billion. Skeptics including short seller Jim Chanos, who challenged Huang directly this week, and Michael Burry, who warned in July that circular spending had reached "biblical proportions," argue the growing financial role makes it harder to separate underlying chip demand from demand enabled by Nvidia's own capital, while Polymarket gives Nvidia a 79% chance of finishing 2026 as the world's largest company by market capitalization. Nvidia's second-quarter revenue jumped 106% year over year to $96.2 billion, with data center revenue up 117% to $89 billion.

DigitalOcean Holdings has entered into a new $725 million equipment finance facility to fund capacity expansion for its AI-Native Cloud platform. The facility matures on September 10, 2030, and includes an accordion option of up to $300 million that the company intends to exercise, subject to obtaining commitments from new or existing lenders and other conditions. DigitalOcean said it will use the facility to acquire GPU, CPU, and other required equipment to meet customer demand, aligning cash outflows with revenue at an attractive cost of capital. MUFG Bank, Ltd. served as sole Administrative Agent and Collateral Agent, while MUFG Bank, Ltd., Axos Bank, BMO Bank N.A. and Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. acted as Joint Lead Arrangers and Joint Bookrunners, with PNC Bank, N.A. as Document Agent. Chief Financial Officer Matt Steinfort said the company continues to manage its balance sheet from a position of strength, with low leverage and healthy adjusted free cash flow margins, and remains highly confident in its guidance for Q3 and the full year 2026 as well as its outlook for 2027.

Rackspace Technology shares rose more than 6% in premarket trading Thursday after the company joined the Nvidia Cloud Partner Program. The partnership will strengthen Rackspace's ability to provide and manage NVIDIA-powered AI computing for regulated and sovereign enterprises. Chief executive officer Gajen Kandiah said AI sovereignty is ultimately about control of data, models and the intelligence an organization creates, adding that NVIDIA provides the accelerated computing foundation while Rackspace brings the infrastructure, engineering and operations required to run it in production. Rackspace also said its new Institutional Sovereign Pod, a governed AI infrastructure architecture, will bring together NVIDIA's Blackwell technology with Palantir's Foundry and AIP platforms to give enterprises control over their data, models and AI environments. Rackspace provides forward-deployed engineering and managed operations for the environment, helping customers move from deployment to production faster and reach value sooner.

Palantir Technologies has named Nebius Group its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner for commercial customers, extending its government-focused partnership with Nvidia to the private sector. The deal, announced September 8, will integrate Nebius compute and inference endpoints into Palantir's enterprise perimeter, allowing customers to deploy open-weight models on Nebius hardware while retaining control over data and model weights. Nebius shares rose as much as 6% to $239.23 on the news, while Palantir slipped about 1%. Nebius reported second-quarter revenue of $582.3 million, up 454% year over year, with adjusted EBITDA of $236.2 million, though three clients accounted for 59% of that revenue and no financial terms were disclosed for the Palantir arrangement. Palantir's own second-quarter sales grew 93% to $1.935 billion, and it raised full-year guidance to imply 82% revenue growth. The companies plan modular data centers at sites with secured power, addressing the electricity bottleneck in AI capacity.