Nebius Breaks Ground in Missouri as EU Cloud Law Reshapes the Playing Field

Nebius expands AI infrastructure with massive Missouri campus, but stock faces headwinds from Meta's planned cloud business and regulatory shifts in Europe.

The shovels are in the ground in Independence, Missouri, where Nebius has started work on a 400?acre AI data centre campus designed for gigawatt?scale operations. The move comes at a moment when the company’s stock is nursing its deepest correction of the year, but the expansion drive signals that management is betting the long?term demand for compute power will dwarf any short?term turbulence.

The Missouri site will bundle power, cooling and compute capacity for the most demanding AI workloads, with Nvidia backing the project. Nebius says the campus will create more than 1,300 jobs. It is not the only new anchor: the company recently secured land and up to 1.2 gigawatts of power capacity for a separate facility in Pennsylvania, underscoring the pace at which it is building out a physical network to meet the insatiable appetite for AI infrastructure.

Across the Atlantic, a regulatory tailwind is gathering force. In June 2026 the European Commission passed the “Cloud and AI Development Act”, a law that aims to at least triple the EU’s data centre capacity within a few years while sharply cutting reliance on non?European cloud giants. Strict security rules for sensitive government data and measures to make switching providers easier are designed to force a fundamental shift in the market. Nebius, which directs its global operations from Amsterdam, is already building giant AI data centres in Finland and Missouri – a footprint that aligns neatly with Europe’s new data?sovereignty push.

Yet the stock’s recent slide shows that an equally powerful force is pulling in the opposite direction. Reports that Meta Platforms is planning its own cloud business, internally called “Meta Compute”, have spooked investors. If Meta sells access to its own AI compute power and models to external customers, it becomes a direct rival to the “neocloud” providers that have relied heavily on its business. Nebius holds a $27 billion contract with Meta, and CoreWeave has a $21 billion deal. The market reacted sharply: both stocks lost roughly 15% in a single session after the news broke, and IREN also came under pressure.

Gil Luria, managing director at D.A. Davidson, summed up the structural risk: companies like CoreWeave and Nebius depend on Meta for their growth – and Meta can simply move on without them.

The share closed Friday at €194.00, up 2.79% on the day but still 25.67% below the June all?time high of €261.00. Over the past week the loss is 8.32%, and over 30 days it stands at 10.62%. The annualised volatility is a staggering 105%. The relative strength index at 44.8 points to a neutral technical posture, with the stock trading near its 50?day moving average of €190.42.

For all the noise, the operating numbers tell a different story. In the first quarter of 2026, Nebius generated revenue of $399.0 million – a 684% jump from a year earlier. Management now expects full?year revenue above $3 billion, with a potential doubling again in 2027.

The catch is the sheer capital intensity of the build?out. Analysts caution that profit and cash flow projections could crumble if even moderate pricing pressure hits the compute business, because Nebius depends on external funding to bridge the gap between its liquidity and its investment needs.

Nvidia’s equity stake in Nebius provides a crucial edge: guaranteed access to the graphics processors that remain the biggest bottleneck in AI expansion. That alliance, combined with targeted acquisitions such as Tavily and Eigen AI, strengthens the company’s position as a full?stack infrastructure provider.

Still, the stock’s trajectory over the next few months will be determined by two questions. Can Nebius prove it can win market share under the new EU regulatory framework? And can it show concrete operational progress on its European and US capacity expansions without stretching its capital structure too thin? The Missouri groundbreaking is a tangible reply to the first part of that equation – but the second part remains wide open.