Nebius Accelerates Cloud Ambitions with $25 Billion Capex Target, Marketplace Deals, and a Meta-Sized Question Mark

Nebius Group shifts from GPU rental to managed services, acquiring Eigen AI and raising capex to $20-25B. Meta's cloud move spooked investors, yet 2025 revenue surged 479% to $529.8M.

Nebius Group is pivoting hard away from the commodity end of the AI infrastructure business. The company has acquired Eigen AI to bolster its inference and model-optimisation capabilities and, earlier this month, integrated Saturn Cloud’s platform into its own marketplace, allowing customers to fine-tune models directly on Nvidia-optimised infrastructure without manual integration. The moves mark a deliberate strategy to move up the value chain — from pure GPU rental to higher-margin managed services — just as a potential new rival looms.

That rival is Meta Platforms. A Bloomberg report on 1 July revealed that the Facebook parent is weighing an entry into the cloud-computing rental market, selling excess AI compute capacity directly to enterprises. The news sent Nebius shares down more than 17% in a single session, while peers CoreWeave and IREN lost 14% and 5%, respectively. Roth Capital quickly dismissed the sell-off as overblown, but the episode underscored a vulnerability that has become central to the Nebius investment narrative: the risk that hyperscalers could flood the market with GPU capacity.

Nebius is responding with scale. The company has raised its 2026 capital expenditure target to a range of $20–25 billion, up from the previously planned $16–20 billion, citing strong customer commitments and anticipated demand for 2027. To support that build-out, Nebius is expanding its connected power capacity to between 800 megawatts and 1 gigawatt, with a longer-term ambition of over 2 gigawatts. The infrastructure will be designed to run Nvidia’s latest generations, including the Vera-Rubin platform. Despite the enormous outlay, management expects to sustain an adjusted EBITDA margin of roughly 40%, though they acknowledge fluctuations during the ramp-up of new capacity.

The financials already reflect blistering growth. For the full year 2025, Nebius reported revenue of $529.8 million, a 479% jump from the prior year. In the fourth quarter alone, revenue surged 547% to $227.7 million. For 2026, the company guides for revenue between $3.0 billion and $3.4 billion, and it expects its annualised revenue run-rate to hit $7–9 billion by year-end. That would represent a quantum leap from the current base, and analysts are divided on whether the pipeline of customer contracts can fill the gap.

The stock, meanwhile, remains well off its highs. Nebius shares closed the Thursday session at €189.18, roughly 27.5% below the record of €261.00 set on 22 June — the same day the stock joined the Nasdaq-100 alongside Astera Labs, CoreWeave, Rocket Lab and Teradyne. That index inclusion has provided mechanical buying support from tracking funds, helping to cushion the post-Meta volatility. The 30-day annualised volatility stands at nearly 109%, and the shares are trading about 4% below their 50-day moving average of €195.41, though still well above the 200-day average of €117.44. The relative strength index of 45.3 signals neutral momentum.

Yet the insider trading pattern gives some investors pause. Infrastructure chief Andrey Korolenko has sold an estimated $115 million worth of shares over the past six months, while CEO Arkady Volozh has cashed out roughly $14.4 million in the same period. That wave of selling contrasts with the company’s aggressive expansion narrative and adds a layer of caution to the institutional debate.

Morgan Stanley analyst Baer, who rates the stock a hold with a $144 price target, describes current targets as “aggressive” and notes that Nebius still needs to convert its ambitious revenue goals into hard contracts. The company does not yet have a long earnings track record to justify its elevated valuation. Still, the broader context tempers the bear case: from a low of €38 in July 2025, the stock has rallied more than 393%, and the year-to-date gain remains an impressive 147.3%.

With the Saturn Cloud partnership now live and Eigen AI fully integrated, Nebius is betting that a richer service stack will differentiate it from both hyperscalers and pure-play GPU lenders. Whether that bet pays off hinges on the execution of a $25 billion capital plan — and on how quickly Meta, or any other deep-pocketed entrant, decides to turn the cloud compute market into a price war.