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NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC at GTC Berlin that neocloud demand is off the charts, but working capital and scarce European power limit growth. Nebius and CoreWeave shares slid premarket.
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Jensen Huang delivers the GTC Berlin keynote. The photo is from NVIDIA's press kit; the CNBC interview itself was not photographed.
Image: NVIDIA
Source · Press image from the NVIDIA newsroom, used for news reporting.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said on October 22 that neocloud demand is "off the charts" but that scarce working capital is holding their growth back, CNBC reported from the company's GTC conference in Berlin.
Huang made the remarks in an interview with CNBC's Arjun Kharpal. He said the missing piece is the working capital to fund the growth, because demand for capital across many AI sectors is much greater than the supply. "That's going to get solved," he said, without giving a timeline or a figure.
Neoclouds are specialist providers that rent GPU capacity, and they are among the biggest buyers of NVIDIA accelerators. Their ability to raise money therefore feeds directly into NVIDIA's order book, which is why a comment from its chief executive on financing carries weight for chip supply as well as for data-center buildouts.
CNBC noted that electricity is a major limit on the AI boom, especially in Europe where prices are higher. Huang said that allocating the region's scarce energy to companies such as Nebius and Mistral is crucial for their growth.
He argued that Europe has to start with its own infrastructure before outside investment can build on it. If European neoclouds establish that base, he said, the AI economy can be built on top of it, and he added that Europe will need many more neoclouds. For grid and data-center planners, the point is that NVIDIA's CEO is publicly tying European GPU deployment to power allocation, not only to chip supply.
According to CNBC, Huang has spent the month on a European media tour as NVIDIA looks to expand investment in the region. The outlet said the company has committed nearly $10 billion to companies, universities and research institutions, and that it announced stakes worth over $1 billion in five U.K. startups during a London visit last week.
CNBC also reported that neocloud shares such as CoreWeave and Nebius have been selling off on concern over infrastructure spending and slower-than-expected returns, and that investors are wary of the debt CoreWeave uses to fund its data-center build. Premarket on Thursday, Nebius was down 3.6% and CoreWeave 4%, with Iren and Applied Digital each down nearly 4%.
Neocloud shares fell between 3.6% and 4% premarket on Oct 22, according to CNBC.
Illustration (AI-generated)
Voltgrid has reported on the financing side of that picture, including Nebius's $3.5 billion 364-day Citi facility for data centers and GPUs.
Huang gave no figures for how much capital neoclouds need, no proposal for how the gap would be closed and no list of which European sites would receive power. His "financeable asset" framing of computing power appears in headlines of other outlets, but the CNBC article read for this report does not include it, so Voltgrid does not rely on it. Watch for concrete financing deals tied to NVIDIA hardware and for any national or regional power allocation decisions covering European neocloud sites.
