DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a publicly traded (NYSE: DOCN) developer and small-to-mid-market cloud that entered the GPU market in 2023 by acquiring Paperspace and folding its infrastructure into the DigitalOcean brand as "GPU Droplets." Unlike the training-focused neocloud pack (CoreWeave, Crusoe, Nebius) chasing frontier-lab contracts on 100,000-GPU campuses, DigitalOcean sells GPU capacity the same way it sells VMs: per-second billing, self-serve via API, and single-GPU minimums aimed at startups, indie developers, and enterprises building inference or fine-tuning workloads rather than pre-training runs.

Its GPU fleet is spread across colocation footprint (NYC2, TOR1, ATL1, RIC1, AMS3) rather than owned campuses; a March 2025 expansion deal with Flexential added high-density H200 and AMD Instinct capacity. The catalog covers Nvidia H100, H200, and Blackwell HGX B300 alongside AMD MI300X, MI325X, and MI350X, with on-demand pricing published between roughly $0.76 and $11.19 per GPU-hour. In April 2026 the company repositioned as an "AI-native cloud built for the inference era" and launched a managed Inference Engine, tying its GPU business to agentic and inference workloads rather than training scale.

The strategic bet is the long tail: whereas neoclouds compete on multi-hundred-megawatt anchor tenants, DigitalOcean's advantage is the same self-serve motion, catalog PCI, and roughly 600,000 paying customers that already power its core cloud, with GPU capacity offered as another SKU. Total company revenue was $692.9 million in 2023 (per Wikipedia summary of 10-K); AI-specific revenue is disclosed only qualitatively as a fast-growing segment inside overall results.