The neocloud stock rout continues as Elon Musk warns of 'guppy-level death'

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Elon Musk said that many neocloud companies face "guppy-level death." Bloomberg/Getty Images

Neocloud companies are sliding even lower.

Shares dropped further on Monday after Elon Musk warned that many of them face "guppy-level death."

CoreWeave and Nebius have both fallen more than 30% over the past month, largely due to growing concerns about the debt they've taken on to build more data centers.

Soon after Monday's open, shares in both companies were down a further 4%, while Iren, another publicly traded neocloud, fell 2%.

The declines follow a string of X posts from Musk on Sunday evening questioning the neocloud business model.

"As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn't have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers," he said.

"That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation," he added. "Some will make it through, but not many."

Musk said that while SpaceX has closed $40 billion in debt to buy GPUs, his company makes money through Starlink and rocket launches.

Meanwhile, investors are worried that a slowing AI boom could leave debt-heavy neoclouds struggling to service their loans.

After one X user posted arguing that Musk was trying to drive down the share prices of neocloud companies to acquire them, Musk replied: "SpaceX is not buying any neoclouds. Pointless."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang remains bullish about the sector. "The demand for the neoclouds is off the charts," he told CNBC last Thursday.

Nvidia holds significant stakes in CoreWeave, Nebius, and other cloud-computing companies.

However, a recent Bernstein Research report analyzed thousands of planned US data centers and estimated that only about 35% of the announced capacity will be built.

"Press releases are cheap … concrete is not," Bernstein analysts wrote in a research note.