- Rumble is looking to supercharge the cloud business it launched last year
- The company revealed it is eyeing an all stock deal to acquire Northern Data Group
- But Rumble faces an uphill battle against hyperscalers and making a name for itself among a sea of neoclouds
First, Rumble came for YouTube. Now, it seems to have its sights set on disrupting the cloud market via a deal to buy Northern Data Group’s cloud and data center businesses.
Rumble has pitched Northern an all stock deal that would value the latter at nearly $1.2 billion. Though Northern hasn’t formally accepted, one of its major shareholders – a company called Tether – is onboard with the move.
The deal would net Rumble a significant number of GPUs, including approximately 20,480 Nvidia H100s and 2,048 H200s, five fully owned data centers and some collocated assets. It would also more than double Rumble’s revenue given Rumble’s Q2 sales came in at $25.1 million and Northern’s were around $46.6 million (40.2 million Euros).
“We've always been ambitious, but today we're in a different position: pursuing bold initiatives to not only compete with, but surpass, big tech peers,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski said in an earnings release.
Who is Rumble?
If you’re not familiar with Rumble already, here’s the lowdown.
Founded in 2013 as an alternative video platform, the company followed up with the launch of a cloud business in March 2024. This month it also launched a cryptocurrency wallet.
It’s kind of hard to tell how large Rumble’s cloud business is at this point given it doesn’t break out cloud revenue from its Other Initiatives category and Pavlovski sidestepped a direct question on the topic during Q2 earnings.
In Q2, we know that of the $2.6 million in year on year revenue growth the company achieved, cloud contributed $800,000.
Of the business, Pavlovski noted “we are seeing quite a lot of interest, and this is coming from not just governments and countries, we’re also starting to see interest from large corporate entities.” He added it has entered RFP processes with multiple governments and corporate entities where it is competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
“We’re talking very, very large opportunities,” he said. “We anticipate that this could snowball into becoming something much larger in the next year or two.”
Fierce’s take - Do they stand a chance?
In short, Rumble has a steep climb if it wants to get anywhere near hyperscale status – we’re talking an Everest-level hike.
Though the deal with Northern will get Rumble a handful of data centers, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number operated by hyperscalers.
Data from Synergy Research Group showed hyperscalers had 1,189 data centers as of June 2025, accounting for 44% of global data center capacity. The firm predicted that by 2030, the latter figure will jump to 61%.
And even though the deal will also help Rumble bag coveted Nvidia GPUs, it’s worth noting that those chips – while still useful – will become rapidly outdated given Nvidia has increased the pace at which it is pumping out new chips to an annual cadence.
The H100s were unveiled in early 2022 and starting shipping late that year while the H200s were announced in November 2024 and started shipping in the back half of 2024. Nvidia has already outlined its chip roadmap to 2028, which means there will soon be even more distance between the state-of-the-art and the H100 chips.
Then there’s the money question. Even if it wanted to just be a successful neocloud a la CoreWeave, Rumble would have to burn some serious cash. CoreWeave, for reference, has been financing its explosive growth in large part with a mountain of debt. Given Rumble only had $306.4 million in liquidity as of the end of Q2, that means it would likely have to travel a similar path.
Sure, the infrastructure-as-a-service sector was a $171.8 billion market in 2024, but Rumble is far from the only company challenging the hyperscalers in hopes of securing a slice. S&P Global Market Intelligence recently counted 54 neoclouds operating in this space.
Can Rumble make a name for itself in the crowd? We’ll have to wait and see how the Northern situation plays out and whether Rumble actually wins any of those RFP contracts Pavlovski touted. Until then, they’ll remain a small fish in a big pond.