Together AI, a neocloud for open AI models, raised $800 million led by Aramco Ventures. Valuation $8.3 billion. According to the company, inference comes out up to 60 times cheaper than closed models.
- Together AI (a neocloud for open models) raised $800 million Series C at an $8.3 billion valuation on 1 July, led by Aramco Ventures.
- Orders above $1.15 billion; claims inference 6-60x cheaper than closed models.
- Plans ~50x capacity over 5 years; Aramco's fund calls it the biggest infrastructure project in history.
We wrote that Together AI had raised $1.3 billion in total, and the Prosperity7 quote was rendered inaccurately. The $1.3 billion figure isn't in the official texts and was removed; the quote was replaced with the real one from the press release. The sentence saying Meta 'started selling compute last week' was corrected: that is a Bloomberg report from the same day, which Meta doesn't confirm. The conclusion doesn't change.
Together AI - a neocloud that rents out clusters of Nvidia GPU-based hardware for training and inference of open models - announced a round of $800 million. Behind the money sits a quiet but real shift. More and more companies are fleeing closed models for open ones, because the math comes out at half. Or a tenth.
It's not about the sum. The story is who's pulling the strings. When an oil giant from the Gulf puts $800 million into a cloud for open models, that's not a bet on one company. That's a bet that the open stack will get big enough to feed infrastructure on the scale of oil.
Neoclouds stopped being a niche word. The same day, Bloomberg reported, without confirmation from Meta, that Meta is getting ready to sell compute too. And a pure neocloud raises a round for billions. The layer between the chip and the model is no longer infrastructure. It's turning into its own industry - and it's still gaining weight, whether you're watching it or not.