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The NeoCloud Summit Is Almost Here

In under three years, neoclouds went from a fringe experiment to critical AI infrastructure — the GPU-first layer now sitting between the hyperscalers and the enterprise. On October 8 at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco, the people actually building that layer take the main stage for a single, packed day.

This room has never existed before. 

Nearly 50 neoclouds — in one room, for one day. The operators, chipmakers, and capital allocators deciding where AI compute goes next, all in the same place. That's not a trade show. That's where the next cloud gets built.

If you’re joining us on OCT8 here's what you'd be walking into.

The day opens by setting the stakes. Our first panel, State of the NeoCloud: The Builders Rewriting Cloud Economics, puts WEKA CEO Liran Zvibel, Silicon Data's Steven Hou, and Remanie.ai's Tiffany Wilson on stage — moderated by Supermicro's Carl Brown — to map where neocloud demand is really heading as workloads tip from training to inference. It's the framing session for the entire day, and it's a strong one.

From there it gets specific fast. AMD takes the keynote stage twice — first on building your AI cloud in the agentic era, then later alongside Cerebras for one of the day's most technical sessions, Splitting the Brain: Disaggregated Inference. Prefill and decode want different things; this panel breaks down why running each half on purpose-built hardware is reshaping throughput, latency, and cost. If you buy inference hardware, this is your session.

The infrastructure reality check. Powering the NeoCloud brings three operators from three continents — Jazz Computing (Europe), Moonshot Energy (US), and Panadina (Colombia) — moderated by iMasons chairman Dean Nelson, to answer the question everyone's dancing around: power, permits, or packets — where's the real bottleneck? The AI boom isn't constrained by chips anymore. This panel says it out loud.

Where the money is — and isn't. Our Private Capital Finance panel is a rare one: the people writing the checks from Morgan Stanley, Digital Alpha, and Acasia on what actually gets funded at the compute layer, why they say no, and what still has to exist before GPUs are financed as easily as the buildings around them. If you're trying to understand when compute becomes bankable, you won't get a more candid room.

The inference economy, from silicon to API. A run of sessions digs into the layer everyone's racing to own: The Inference Stack with SambaNova, Digital Ocean, and Vultr; When Does GPU Capacity Become an AI Cloud? with Zyphra and QumulusAI; and Enterprise Tokenomics with ServiceNow, TransUnion, and WEKA asking whether the agentic wave is quietly blowing up enterprise token consumption. Spoiler: it is.

Plus the sessions buyers keep asking us about — The NeoCloud Security Gap (Cisco-moderated, on why tenant isolation can't be an afterthought), Inferencing + Bare Metal (what inference providers actually look for in a GPU partner, straight from the buyer's seat), and an open benchmark keynote, The Real Cost of a Token, giving operators a shared framework to cut through vendor claims. Woven throughout: keynotes from Upscale AI on unifying heterogeneous compute, and Vultr on the new era of enterprise, AI-native infrastructure.

What to expect for the day. 

Doors open at 7:45 AM, with coffee + networking at 8 AM and the program kicking off at 9 AM sharp. From there it's main-stage programming straight through, broken up by expo networking over lunch and prize giveaways between sessions. We wrap into a Happy Hour in the Expo Lounge from 4:30–6:30 PM. For those staying to continue the relationship building, a post-dinner AFTERGLOW event hosted by Charg Cloud and Limestone is on the agenda.

This is a working room. Operators trading notes on utilization. Buyers sizing up partners. Investors deciding what's next. No fluff, no 50-booth sprawl — just the people building the neocloud, in one place, for one day.

If NeoCloud economics, inference infrastructure, or AI compute finance is anywhere near your 2027 roadmap, October 8 is where the next cloud gets built — and you want to be in it

Bay Area Startups Collectively Secured $18B+ in September

$18B for the month of September, with thirty megadeals across multiple sectors, including AI infrastructure (Positron AI, Cscale, TAR), cybersecurity (Upwind Security, Cylake), robotics (Lyte AI, Maven Robotics), healthcare (Angle Health), fintech (Tabapay, Numeral), entertainment (NEX) and biotech (Encoded Therapeutics).

Exits, IPOs: As Oura, SB Energy, OpenAI - and others - have pushed back their IPOs to 2027, a deflated IPO market is waiting to see if Anthropic will still push ahead. Per Bloomberg, the company is still planning to go public, now eyeing November as its target.

Startups: Looking for investors, partners, possible competitors? Best deal in the valley is the Pulse of the Valley weekday newsletter and alerts to keep you on top of all three plus database keyword search gives you even more prospects for investors, partners and customers. Founders get the newsletter, and alerts for just $7/month ($50 value). Check it out and sign up here.

Follow LinkSV on LinkedIn to get early notice of new tech, stay on top of SV funding intelligence, and keep track of the companies, investors and executives impacting the startup ecosystem.

Early Stage:

• Volantis closed a $88M Series A, a semiconductor company building a new architecture for AI inference.

• Proximal closed a $15M Seed, builds AI training data and environments to improve software engineering agents and autonomous coding systems.

• Autoheal closed a $7.9M Seed, a self-improving software factory for enterprise engineering teams.

• Beltic closed a $7.3M Seed, allows businesses to safely accept agents.

• Overlord Labs closed a $4.4M Seed, fusing analog IC precision and AI-powered digital intelligence into a next-generation Battery Management System (BMS) platform.

Growth Stage:

• Armadin closed a $255.5M Series B, an AI-native company delivering the definitive offensive security platform to identify and eliminate an organization's exploitable risks.

• GMI Cloud closed a $223M Series B, a digital infrastructure company with the mission of empowering anyone to deploy AI effortlessly.

• SiMa.ai closed a $150M Series C, delivering a purpose-built platform that brings best-in-class performance, power efficiency, and ease of use to Physical AI applications.

• CScale closed a $145M Series C, building an integrated light engine to deliver reliable optical connectivity for AI infrastructure at gigawatt scale.

• Sunflower Labs closed a $14.9M Series B, builds an autonomous security drone system for commercial, industrial and high-end residential properties.

The Builder of Builders Awards Gala // SEP29

The 2026 iMasons Awards Gala took place at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, co-located with the Yotta 2026 conference. Marking the 10th anniversary of Infrastructure Masons, the evening celebrated a decade of progress by honoring the visionary leaders, innovative organizations, and dedicated chapters shaping the future of global digital infrastructure. The ceremony highlighted achievements across critical industry pillars through various honors, including the prestigious Luminary Award, Sustainability and Innovation Champion awards, and a special Top 10 Award recognizing foundational figures from the organization's first decade.

// Whats Next

Neoclouds at OCP 2026!?

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Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads

Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:

After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.

The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.

“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”

Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.

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