“Imagine a one-year deal for 1,000 [Nvidia] B300s chips at $5 an hour. That would be $45 million for one year. So if you just take 5 percent of that, it’s a couple million dollars for WWT,” said World Wide Technology’s Chris Campbell.
With enterprises’ hunger for AI GPUs far outweighing supply, solution providers are turning to neoclouds who are happily opening their arms to the channel with GPU-as-a-service offerings, new partner programs for the AI era and large customer deals for partners.
“The idea that a channel partner can come in and work with a neocloud that has access to that capacity, access to those chips—that’s a huge win for not only the channel partner, but for the client,” said Chris Campbell, senior director of AI solutions and GPU as a service for World Wide Technology. “We see this as an essential piece of the puzzle for AI workload placement.”
If customers can’t buy GPU chips for on-premise or put them in the public cloud for reasons like data sovereignty reasons or privacy, “then neocloud becomes the perfect option,” Campbell said.
“It’s fully managed up through the Kubernetes layer. It’s something that they can get for two or three years that allows customers to be able to support their AI workloads,” he said. “There is so much demand for capacity and there’s not enough capacity of these particular chips right now. So if you’re a channel partner with customers looking for this type of service, neoclouds are giving access to those chips and services.”
‘These Deals Will Be Big In Scale’ As Neocloud Market Skyrockets
The neocloud market is scaling at an unprecedented pace, reaching $9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, representing an increase of 223 percent year over year, according to data from Synergy Research Group.
Neoclouds are emerging as a rapidly scaling category of cloud infrastructure, purpose-built to deliver GPU-centric computing for AI workloads. The neocloud market—led by companies such as CoreWeave, Crusoe, Lambda, and Nebius—exceeded a record $25 billion in 2025 driven by surging demand for AI infrastructure.
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For WWT, neocloud partners like Nebius are generating profitability around GPU as a service and “giant” deal sizes, he said.
“Imagine a one-year deal for 1,000 [Nvidia] B300s chips at $5 an hour. That would be $45 million for one year. So if you just take 5 percent of that, it’s a couple million dollars for WWT,” Campbell said. “So we see this as a massive opportunity for us. We continue to see that these deals will be big in scale.”
Campbell said customers aren’t seeking a few dozen or even 100 GPUs right now. “They need 300, 500 or 1,000, some want more. So the deal sizes are substantial and gives us a huge opportunity to be able to generate revenue for WWT,” he said.
Neocloud providers like Nebius are seeing so much demand that for every GPU cluster they bring online, “we have four to five customers that are already lined up to take it,” said Nebius’ Laurelle Roseman, vice president of global partnerships.
“We view channel partners as a major accelerator and to help us get into new markets, to help us expand into the enterprise, and we want to provide the partner ecosystem this additional value that they can’t get with some other partners who are just providing the infrastructure. Partners today want to wrap their services around us,” she said.
Cloud Hyperscalers Can ‘Kill’ A Channel Partners Business; Nebius To Launch Partner Program
Nebius, for its part, is currently putting the final touches on a formal partner program that will roll out this summer. The program will have tiered incentives, AI training and education, as well as co-selling opportunities.
“From the hyperscaler perspective, what I’ve heard from our partners is that they don’t make margin and they don’t get access. So those are two key things that kill their business,” she said.
This year, Nebius formed a distribution partnership with TD Synnex around dedicated Nvidia GPUs on the Nebius AI Cloud infrastructure, which TD Synnex’s channel partners can offer to clients.
“What we’re trying to do is allow partners to have access, which we’ve shown with the TD Synnex opportunity and other things that we have in pipeline right now, but from a margin perspective—they can make up to double digits if they wrap their services around it,” she said.
Channel partners are more critical than ever before in enabling businesses to achieve their AI goals and the deployment of AI solutions in production.
“Even AI-native companies now want to go now buy through the channel because they see the potential of their bundle, what they’re doing on Nebius’ infrastructure, and how their solution gets pushed through distribution to enterprise customers,” she said.
“Look at what the partner ecosystem had done for the cloud hyperscalers. They’re a core part of their business motion now,” she said. “So we want to be the frontier neocloud to build those programs and provide value to these partners.”
Neocloud Market To Hit $400 Billion
Synergy is forecasting that the neocloud market will reach $400 billion by 2031, representing a sustained 58 percent annual growth rate over the next five years.
“What we are observing is not merely the emergence of a new class of cloud provider, but a deeper structural realignment in the architecture of computation itself,” said Jeremy Duke, founder and chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, in an email to CRN.
Duke said traditional cloud hyperscale systems were conceived around a form of generalized elasticity, whereas AI workloads impose far more rigid constraints.
“Neoclouds are, in effect, an architectural response to those constraints,” Duke said. “As AI moves from exploratory phases into sustained, large-scale deployment, these underlying differences cease to be incidental and instead become determinative of how compute systems evolve.”
Vultr CMO: Partners Can Make ‘Big, Hefty’ Margins
On the GPU service provider front, companies like Vultr are doubling down on the channel.
“We’ve been building towards this moment for four years,” said Kevin Cochrane, chief marketing officer at Vultr, a provider of infrastructure as a service, cloud GPUs and more.
For years, Vultr has been building alliances with open-source providers like Red Hat, GPU providers like Nvidia and AMD, and many more vendors across the IT stack to combine all the different components to run on infrastructure that delivers an actual solution for customers.
“While others were focused on just turning over bare metal servers to off-takers, we focused on building a proper AI infrastructure stack. At the core of that was a vision around open, composable ecosystems and a marketplace of solution providers,” said Cochrane.
Vultr is set to launch a formalized channel program this year seeking to onboard about 100 different partners to start, with a focus on system integrators (SIs). He said SIs are the ones who can actually take a composable IT stack and deliver a business outcome.
“Now we’re aligning with channel partners to actually deliver those composable stacks for use cases and for specific industries,” he said.
“We seek to drive 100 percent of our business through the channel. We want Accenture, Deloitte, every partner to just be reselling our services. They can take a big, heft margin off of it,” he added.
AI Era ‘Has To Be System Integrator-Led’
Cochrane said the AI era is the next wave of IT digitization, similar to digital services and applications transformation in the early 2000s, as well as cloud computing transformation in the 2010s.
“Could you imagine enterprises transforming to the cloud without the guidance of SIs? It wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
“This [AI era] has to be SI-led. It’s going to include: a composable stack of open-source technology; it’s going to need to run on infrastructure that’s incredibly cost efficient and performant; incredibly resilient, it has to be global; and super secure and compliant. It just so happens that Vultr been building toward this moment, and we do those five things better than anyone else,” he said.
One thing is for sure: Neocloud and cloud GPU providers are investing heavily in the channel.
“I’m hiring for partner enablement. I’m building out a specific partner solution architect support team to help our partners and their customers. In partner marketing, we’re doubling down on investing,” said Nebius’ Roseman.
Demand For ‘Chips Will Not Stop’
WWT, for its part, sees massive global opportunities in the neocloud market.
“Demand for chips will not stop,” said WWT’s Campbell.
WWT will need to partner with neocloud companies in order to support all of its customers on a global scale.
“With sovereign data centers worldwide, data has to sit in these different countries. So neocloud providers in the U.S. can cover sovereignty in the United States, but once you get over into EMEA or APAC, you might need a neocloud that sits in Korea, or you need a neocloud that sits in Australia, or you need one in Japan, because that data has to reside there,” Campbell said.
WWT currently partners with just a handful of neocloud providers today, but capacity demand is so hot on a global basis that WWT will need more partnerships soon.
“We’re sitting with five or six (neocloud) partners today. We will triple that over the next year or so with these enterprise class ready neoclouds, especially globally,” he said. “I see these being huge opportunities, not only for US-based companies, but also for global companies as they continue to grow.”
