This week, Nebius and CoreWeave both pitched investors on a new business opportunity—shorter-term contracts. The neoclouds said these deals would allow them to cash in on surging prices for AI compute capacity amid a crunch for GPUs, and investors seemed to agree, with shares in both companies moving sharply higher.

While the neoclouds are selling investors on fat margins on quick deals, cloud giant Amazon Web Services had used its earnings call to highlight that it was selling most of its AI capacity via five-year deals. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said these long deals ensure AWS will generate enough revenue to make money on its data center build-out. Investors seemed to like this narrative too—Amazon’s stock is up over 11% from its July 30 call.