The Neocloud complex have staged a massive comeback after a brutal start to 2026. But the gains are not widespread among all stocks.

Neoclouds have rapidly grown since when the Pragmatic Optimist newsletter first reviewed the industry last year, driven by the mad rush for compute.

Crypto miners led the charge in reprioritizing their GPU inventory towards AI & HPC workloads, following the leader CoreWeave $CRWV . At the same time, Nebius $NBIS challenged the crypto miner industry from the outside for neocloud dominance to also address that mad rush for GPU compute. Such was the demand that the entire neocloud industry (again : the entire industry) was growing at >60% CAGR, powered by substantial multi-billion, multi-year backlog wins.

In 2026, markets no longer want to be swept off their feet by the promise of backlog growth. Markets want results. Execution. And the Q1 season for neoclouds was a teaser of what to expect from companies in the neocloud industry over the next 9-12 months.

In this post, the Pragmatic Optimist newsletter update his views on the neocloud market for 2026 and include our top 4 picks from a wide variety of neoclouds that include Core Scientific $CORZ | Applied Digital $APLD | Galaxy Digital $GLXY | Cipher Mining $CIFR | TeraWulf $WULF | Hut8 $HUT | IREN $IREN | Marathon Holdings $MARA | Cleanspark $CLSK , in addition to CoreWeave and Nebius.

📌The TPO Portfolio has staged an impressive rally since March 1, now up 22.5% 💪, significantly beating the S&P 500 and benchmark ETFs that include QQQ $QQQ , GRNY $GRNY , IVES $IVES , and SPRX $SPRX during this period of time.

The Q1 earnings season showed that neoclouds have made some considerable progress at demonstrating their ability to respond to massive demand for AI compute.

Since H2 last year, a growing number of neoclouds have won large billion-dollar multi-year deals, especially from hyperscalers who remain “capacity constrained” but are challenged by the towering requirements of assembling key resources like power, land, etc. themselves.

As seen below, many neoclouds have moved quickly to secure contracted power, (i.e., the energy capacity secured/contracted from utility providers that eventually power GPUs in the ‘to-be constructed’ data center) based on filings/announcements from the Q1 earnings season.