General Compute Hits $800 Million Valuation Amid Neocloud Skepticism

CEO Finn Puklowski remains undeterred by the gloomy market sentiment surrounding companies like CoreWeave. He dismisses warnings from figures like Elon Musk as tactical posturing designed to suppress GPU prices. Instead of chasing the crowded GPU market, General Compute has pivoted toward inference-focused hardware. The company recently finalized a $400 million deal to acquire chips from SambaNova, while adding Positron and Cerebras to its supply chain.

This operational agility extends to their physical footprint. By converting former bitcoin-mining sites and leasing space within existing facilities, the startup avoids the capital-intensive burden of building massive data centers from scratch. Puklowski projects the deployment of 75 megawatts of capacity by 2027, with the potential to scale significantly higher. Investors Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures led the round, pushing the startup to an $800 million post-money valuation. The firm’s business model focuses on providing raw, bare-metal servers to inference-specialized cloud providers, a niche that has already attracted a customer base generating $100 million in annual recurring revenue.