Tod Pedler

Nobody expected a two year old company to out grow Amazon and Microsoft's cloud businesses but the chart proves it happened (Save this). The chart lines up every major cloud provider by how many quarters have passed since each one launched its cloud business. CoreWeave hit roughly $2.6 billion in quarterly revenue by its 26th quarter since launch, a level Azure took nearly 30 quarters to approach and AWS still hasn't reached at the same point in its own timeline. Nebius shows an even steeper early curve, rocketing from near zero to nearly $600 million in quarterly revenue within just seven quarters of its pivot to AI cloud, a pace none of the legacy hyperscalers came close to matching that early in their own histories. Here's why this matters enormously for the bull case on neoclouds. A hyperscaler like AWS or Azure has to support decades of legacy enterprise workloads, security requirements, and a sprawling product catalog, which slows down how fast it can pivot fully toward AI compute. A neocloud has no legacy business to protect, so every dollar of capital and every ounce of company focus goes toward the two most important scaling levers, buying GPUs and turning on data center power to fill demand. The revenue numbers back up the chart. CoreWeave's actual second quarter 2026 revenue hit $2.58 billion, up 112% year over year and its contracted revenue backlog exploded 246% year over year to $104.2 billion, with more than $25 billion in additional commitments already signed in the current quarter alone. That backlog means CoreWeave already knows, with a high degree of certainty, how much revenue it's converting into cash over the next several years, since more than half of that backlog is tied to contracts where customer delivery has already begun. Nebius shows the same acceleration from the other end of the growth curve. Nebius grew revenue 683% year over year in the first quarter of 2026 to $399 million, then followed that with 454% year over year growth in the second quarter to $582 million. Pricing power is showing up in the numbers too. CoreWeave's management explicitly said its near term capacity is effectively sold out and it's now securing new compute agreements on increasingly favorable terms, meaning customers are willing to pay more for guaranteed access rather than waiting in line. That's the clearest sign a business has genuine pricing power, since it's turning scarcity into higher margins rather than discounting to fill capacity. Even using conservative estimates, the neocloud lines are outpacing them at the same point in their growth journey, which suggests the market is underestimating just how quickly specialized AI infrastructure providers can scale relative to diversified hyperscalers. This is exactly why we’ve been so focused on neoclouds at Milk Road, and subscribers are already up massively on some of the trades we’ve made around this theme. If you want to see exactly what we’re buying and trading as this AI infrastructure buildout continues, come join us for just $1 using the link below.