Criticisms on $NBIS : One of my main points in my bull thesis was that NBIS would move away from the commoditized GPU/hour dynamic and build products/move up the stack for higher margin workloads. And controlling the inference/agentic stack would become a moat. But right now I dont see that happening with Nebius. Because: 1) they are themselves heavily leaning on bare-metal deals 2)the software stack is already commoditizing pretty fast, not a long-term moat 3)NVIDIA's platform strategy structurally limits neoclouds' own customization/moat 1st) Bare-metal deals: We all know the Meta/Microsoft deals were for fundraising and not the long term goal. But the famous 4 deals signed last quarter were all bare-metal. Reflection, Cohere, the anon neolabs all have their own software and dont need to pay for Nebius'. The core part of Nebius' bull thesis is that "bare-metal pays well, but with the SaaS layer on top it pays much better". So why hand out scarce capacity for bare metal deals? If the management is talking about its software pricing power and how it can command higher pricing power in every investor conference, why still do bare-metal deals? 2nd) The inference-as-a-service sector is already commoditizing pretty fast and the competition is brutal. New players like $DOCN, $BTDR (yes even an ex-btc miner, 2nd image) are entering the market which is already cutthroat with PaaS companies like TogetherAI and Fireworks. In fact, Nebius introduced serverless inference on March, and right now even Bitdeer has its own serverless inference service. Last week, great news dropped about $NBIS reaching platinum-level on SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX. Which is amazing but how can someone argue "software is a moat" when ironically Nebius itself disproves that point by challenging Coreweave's SaaS capabilities. That tells you that no one is safe by just having "better software" and the gap can be closed. There's been a lot of talk about Nebius' upcoming agent-as-a-service product (which I did a write-up on in May) but it still hasn't been shipped yet. A successful launch here might show that Nebius can outrun commoditization by moving up layers quickly. But it would turn into a "escape the lava" type "climb upward to survive" game which is not a sustainable model at all. 3rd) NVIDIA designs their products so no individual neo gets too powerful: As all investors know, $NBIS designs and builds their own server racks for HGX GPUs. This helps save on margins and become better vertically integrated. On Hopper and Blackwells (HGXs) this worked pretty well. However as compute scales up and out, there is more demand for rack-scale solutions. And NVIDIA pushes neoclouds to buy prebuilt racks from OEMs like DELL, ASUS, Wiwynn etc. This eliminates Nebius' advantage of building own racks. Because NVIDIA pushes the NVL72 architecture on every neocloud, the rack is no longer a Nebius one, its always Nvidia's. This consequently makes compute the same everywhere, a commodity. If no neocloud can differentiate meaningfully, a GB300 rack is substantially the same whether you buy from Coreweave, Nebius, Nscale, Lambda etc. On the 4th image you can see a pretty generic tweet about NVIDIA's connectivity solution being adopted by Nebius. This is a small example but shows how NVIDIA likes to standardize everything, limiting Nebius' ability to differentiate. These were the parts that damaged by original bull thesis quoted below. I still think Nebius is the best neocloud but im not convinced how they will differentiate from other meaningfully and build a long-term platform moat.