Dylan Patel on NeoClouds
From Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis): The Datacenter in 2026: CPUs, RL Environments & Agent-Driven Workloads · · Daytona and SemiAnalysis
“In the age of AI the hyperscalers were a bit slow to move right Google Amazon Microsoft bit slow to move into AI and so a whole new crop of companies popped up and there was a new low bar right there's no need for a lot of the complex software that Amazon Microsoft Google had built up and a lot of this in fact slowed down AI right they had custom networks that were actually not that great for AI they were more focused around reliability and storage traffic rather than doing an all reduce across a network or something like this. So there's a lot of things that these large cloud companies these hyperscalers had that NeoClouds could just skip right and then build focused optimized solutions and deliver much lower cost because they have much lower overhead right there's not 20,000 Google PMs sitting in a meeting at these NeoClouds.”
On , Dylan Patel, Founder, CEO, and Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis, spoke about NeoClouds during Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis): The Datacenter in 2026: CPUs, RL Environments & Agent-Driven Workloads on Daytona and SemiAnalysis.
About Dylan Patel
Dylan Patel, founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis, has been speaking at several industry events in early 2026 about AI infrastructure, benchmarking, and market dynamics. At an Aria Networks launch event in April, Patel stated that AI inference demand has grown so rapidly that the rental price of three-year-old H100 GPUs has risen from around $160-170 per hour to over $240 per hour in six months, with no spare capacity available. He also discussed the InferenceX project, which he described as a free and open-source benchmarking effort with over a thousand GPUs donated by companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Nvidia. In a March interview at the Daytona Compute Conference, Patel said that hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were slow to move into AI, creating an opportunity for "NeoClouds" that could skip complex legacy software. He also noted that the entire cloud market had run out of CPUs, with Amazon's CPU server installations tripling year-over-year. In an April interview with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Patel said his firm's AI token spend had skyrocketed from tens of thousands of dollars annually to $7 million, driven by non-technical staff using AI for coding. He stated that "ideas are cheap and plentiful but execution is very easy," and warned that people who do not use more tokens, generate value from them, and capture that value will "never escape the permanent underclass." Patel also predicted a "large scale protest against Anthropic and AI," citing a Pew survey that he said showed AI is less popular than politicians. In a panel at the Beyond Summit, Patel asserted that vendor benchmark claims are "lies, impossible to achieve," and that "if you're not pissing off people with your benchmark, then you're not testing something useful."