Neolabs that locked in GPUs early can resell compute at a profit, prompting Modal's Erik Bernhardsson to predict 'neolab to neocloud pivots'

Databricks' Yuchen Jin, former co-founder and CTO of Hyperbolic, relayed a comment from an unnamed founder of a 'neolab', a new AI research lab: even if the lab fails to train the best model, it locked in GPU capacity early and, with H100, B200 and B300 rental prices up 2-3x, 'we can just resell the compute and print money'. Modal founder Erik Bernhardsson quote-posted it predicting 'a bunch of neolab to neocloud pivots next year'. The claim is anecdotal, but a16z's Charts of the Week, citing Ornn Data, recently put 2026 rental price rises at roughly +160% for H200, +120% for B200 and +35% for H100.