The neoclouds quietly became the second tier of hyperscale AI infra. Same 100kW racks, same RoCE fabrics, same firmware nightmares — on a fraction of the team and balance sheet. That's the gap OCP's new Scaling AI Clusters at Neoclouds workstream exists to close, and FarmGPU is co-chairing it alongside Scaleway and Denvr Dataworks. A few signals from the first 19-operator community survey worth paying attention to: → Power sourcing and benchmarking are rated the most important 2026 problems (4.21 / 4.05 importance). → But the area where operators think OCP can move the needle most is open rack and pod reference patterns for 30–100kW (4.11 leverage). Hardware ≠ the bottleneck. Operational surface area is. → The top operator pain points: networking (RoCE/IB tuning, congestion control), management & automation (Day-2 ops, firmware), and interoperability (BMC/BIOS/telemetry consistency). Every neocloud is independently re-discovering the same gaps and filing the same tickets to the same OEMs. Concrete output already in motion: 1. A neocloud Redfish profile. Redfish works great on Dell, inconsistently everywhere else. Instead of 20 operators each begging OEMs separately, the workstream is drafting a collective, machine-validatable profile that codifies the BMC, firmware, TLS, telemetry, and event-subscription behaviors neoclouds actually need. One spec OEMs implement against. One checklist procurement validates. 2. FarmGPU is the first neocloud running an OCP-aligned backend fabric in production — the AI Training Fabric Reference Architecture we co-developed with Hedgehog and Celestica. Celestica DS5000 (51.2T) + SONiC + Hedgehog as the K8s-native control plane. 36 ready-to-deploy composition variants spanning OPG-64/128/256/512 → XOC-256/512/1024, air- and liquid-cooled, single- and dual-plane. Vendor-neutral, declarative, reproducible. Contributed back to OCP so nobody has to reinvent it. 3. OCP NVMe SSD spec → predictive failure engine. We standardize on the OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD spec because the telemetry surface is dramatically richer than vanilla NVMe. On top of that we built a fleet-wide predictive failure engine — scores every drive for NAND degradation, ECC escalation, recoverable/uncoverable error trends, surfaces replace/watch/monitor recommendations. Plan is to open-source it so other neoclouds can run it directly. The whole thesis: write down what neoclouds actually need → get OEMs to ship it through OCP → open-source the operator tooling that turns the spec into operational value. That compounds. Full writeup, survey results, hardware-management deep dive recording, and how to join the workstream: blog.farmgpu.com/ocp-scaling… 🌾🚜