# Hyperscalers, neoclouds & model labs (the tenants and owners)

Part ID: 9.02 · Layer 9 (Building shell, site & construction)

The hyperscalers, neoclouds, and AI labs that occupy data center capacity as tenants or owner-operators, and whose capital spending ultimately drives demand for every layer below this one.

These are the buyers: the companies that lease or self-build the buildings from Layer 9.01's developers and REITs, fill them with the compute from Layers 1 through 4, and sell the resulting capacity as cloud services or use it to train and run their own models. The category splits into three tiers with different economics — diversified hyperscalers funding data centers from broad cloud and advertising revenue, neoclouds that are effectively single-purpose GPU-leasing vehicles often financed against the hardware itself, and model labs whose compute is frequently backstopped by a hyperscaler partner or dedicated project financing.
This layer doesn't manufacture anything, but it's the layer every other part of the taxonomy is downstream of: capital expenditure guidance from this group is the earliest signal for order books across silicon, networking, power, and construction. For investors, the key distinction is balance-sheet quality and revenue diversity — a hyperscaler's data center spend is one line in a much larger business, while a neocloud's spend is the business, which makes its debt and lease commitments far more sensitive to utilization and to the resale value of GPU generations as they age.

**AI delta:** AI training and inference workloads are the primary driver of the capital spending that funds every other layer of this taxonomy.

## Companies

| Company | Role | Confidence | Ownership | Ticker | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alibaba | operator | inferred | public | BABA | region: China and Asia |
| Alphabet (Google) | operator | inferred | public | GOOGL |  |
| Amazon (AWS) | operator | inferred | public | AMZN |  |
| Apple | operator | inferred | public | AAPL |  |
| Baidu | operator | inferred | public | BIDU | region: China and Asia |
| KT | operator | inferred | public | 030200.KS | region: China and Asia |
| Meta Platforms | operator | inferred | public | META |  |
| Microsoft | operator | inferred | public | MSFT |  |
| Naver | operator | inferred | public | 035420.KS | region: China and Asia |
| Oracle | operator | inferred | public | ORCL |  |
| Samsung SDS | operator | inferred | public | 018260.KS | region: China and Asia |
| SK Telecom | operator | inferred | public | 017670.KS | region: China and Asia |
| Tencent | operator | inferred | public | 0700.HK | region: China and Asia |
| ByteDance | operator | inferred | private |  | region: China and Asia |
| G42 (Khazna) | operator | inferred | private |  | region: Gulf |
| Huawei | operator | inferred | private |  | region: China and Asia |
| Humain | operator | inferred | private |  | region: Gulf |
| Stargate UAE | operator | inferred | unknown |  | region: Gulf |

Confidence tags: disclosed = company/filing statement; reported = trade press or partner list; inferred = taxonomy lead.