do not differentiate on AI chip GPU features or product capabilities, neoclouds distinguish their products by offer­ing cost-effective, streamlined and specialised AI compute configurations; they also cut costs by limiting their staff and infrastructure overheads. According to the Uptime Institute, the average hourly cost of an Nvidia DGX H100 instance when purchased on demand from a hyperscaler was$98. When an approximately equivalent instance is purchased from a neocloud, the unit cost drops to$34, a substantial 66 % saving(Rogers 2025). For the purposes of our analysis, we differentiate between two types of neocloud providers, considering market share, scale and regional presence: neocloud giants and emerging neoclouds. Neocloud giants are leading providers by market share and scale(typically over 100k chip GPU clusters), which includes Coreweave(the largest neocloud), Crusoe and Nebius. According to SemiAnalysis, these companies are driving consolidation within the neocloud market, which is a threat to smaller providers(Patel& Nishball 2024). Many of these companies have pursued a strategy of meeting hyperscaler excess demand and relying on their baseline utilisation. In contrast, emerging neoclouds offer localised and spe­cialised AI chip GPU services. Companies like Nebul, a Netherlands based neocloud company, are smaller provid­ers by market share and scale, and represent a longer tail of providers with less experience running data centre infra­structure, but which may represent emerging or regionally significant providers. For the purpose of the analysis, we also include convention ­al cloud , representing regionally significant cloud providers (that are not hyperscalers) that are pivoting to offer AI com­pute GPUs-as-a-service. In the EU, smaller European cloud providers like OVH, Hetzner and Exoscale offer AI compute GPU products. These providers often exploit regional differ­entiation by aligning with domestic sovereign AI initiatives, e. g. by catering to companies that want to keep compute out of the US or China for regulatory, privacy, data security or other business reasons(Patel& Nishball 2024). The fol ­lowing section analyses the strategic positioning of these entities within the context of the EU’s pivot towards sover­eign AI infrastructure. 14 Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V.