Anthony Ha
Weekend editor at TechCrunch, writing about technology, startups and AI policy.
“If you're just judging these companies, with the one very notable exception of NVIDIA, by their financials, these are not great companies. They only seem like great companies when you look at growth and then you imagine that hockey stick trajectory continuing.”
Equity · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Discussing neocloud earnings and the market's cooling on them, Ha widens the point to the AI business as a whole: the story only holds if the growth curve keeps going.
Transcript
…than analysts expected. So shares did plunge about 15 to 20% in early trading. But, you know, a lot of that, I'm actually curious how much of that was because of their earnings report or how much was because of NVIDIA stuff, because it kind of all got tied up together in the morning on Thursday.
I think that's going to be one of the biggest challenges for AI-related companies in the coming weeks with their earnings is how much of this is tied to the uncertainty around NVIDIA versus actually what it says about their companies.
Yeah, exactly. I feel like NeoClouds are sort of this pretty good example, I think, of just this broader phenomenon. I mean, you could argue this is a phenomenon of just how public markets work, but certainly we've seen in AI is that if you're just judging these companies with the one very notable exception of NVIDIA by their financials, these are not great companies. It's only they only seem like great companies when you look at growth and then you sort of imagine that sort of hockey stick trajectory continuing. But, you know, with NeoCloud specifically, my sense, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that certainly the market has really soured on them and that, you know, that there was maybe a bit of a bump for Core Weave this week, which we can get into a little bit about why that was, but that overall, like, you know, Core Weave is down pretty significantly for the year. And my sense is not that, oh, like suddenly the business for NeoClouds changed very dramatically. It's that Wall Street suddenly did not necessarily feel as optimistic…
Yeah, I mean, it's, there's a few moving parts that make NeoClouds very risky. And that has really affected their stock price since they went public, you know, specifically Core Weave and Nebius. And I think one of the big ones, like if you look at hyperscalers, right? You look at Meta, Google…
and maybe you have some thoughts on this too, Rebecca, is does this undermine the theory that picks and shovels are what make money in a gold rush, right? I think a lot of people thought that there was going to be money in these tools, data centers, power, et cetera, surrounding the AI boom as…
software itself. And it's sounding like that's maybe not the case. I mean, yeah, I think it's hard to say. Like, how much does it cost to literally make a literal pick and shovel? Probably not that much. How much does it cost to make a data center? A whole lot more. And so much more can go wrong.
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