Don't Buy the Noun: Neocloud and Cloud's Oldest Move
A shoe company taught me most of what I needed to know about neocloud. This spring, Allbirds — the sustainable-sneaker brand, the one that makes shoes out of wool — announced it was selling off its footwear business to reinvent itself as "NewBird AI," a GPU-as-a-Service cloud provider. The stock jumped roughly 580% in a single day. The money behind the pivot was about $50 million, which, at thirty to forty thousand dollars per NVIDIA H100, buys you on the order of fifteen hundred GPUs — a rounding error against what a real AI cloud runs on. The market didn't care. You could bolt "AI cloud" onto a wool-shoe company and six-x the valuation by lunch. ...