Nebius Debuts Voice-Activated AI Agent as $27 Billion Meta Deal Reshapes Its Cloud Pivot

Nebius introduces Aether 3.6 with voice-controlled Echo assistant, achieves 684% revenue growth, and secures $27B Meta contract for Vera-Rubin platform.

Nebius is no longer just renting out GPUs. The company rolled out Aether 3.6 on June 24, embedding a voice-controlled AI assistant called Nebius Echo directly into its web console. The update lets users manage cloud infrastructure through natural language — asking questions, spinning up resources, executing operations — while guardrails prevent accidental actions. The agent runs on open-source models from Nebius’s own Token Factory inference platform, a step toward a self-adapting cloud that adjusts to shifting workloads.

On the security front, the company introduced a Key Management Service for regulated industries like healthcare and finance, giving enterprises full control over their cryptographic keys. Workload Identity Federation replaces permanent credentials in multi-cloud setups with short-lived identities. Storage also got a major boost: single-connection read bandwidth jumped 30 percent, shared file system IOPS tripled for small file operations and surged a hundredfold for metadata-heavy workloads, and validated cluster sizes now hit 100 petabytes. The Nebius Builder Program, still in preview, offers developer credits for cloud, inference, and the Nebius Academy learning platform, with certification rollouts planned for July.

Market reaction has been a study in contrasts. The shares closed at €241.55 after five straight losing days that erased most of the gains from Nebius’s Nasdaq-100 inclusion — a classic “buy the rumor, sell the news” pattern. Then the Meta deal dropped. The stock surged 7.41 percent to €245.55, trimming the distance to its 52-week high of €261.00 to under 6 percent. Year to date, Nebius has climbed 220.98 percent, and over the past twelve months the gain stands at 422.45 percent.

The Meta pact is a multi-year capacity agreement worth around $27 billion, making Nebius an early partner for Nvidia’s upcoming Vera-Rubin platform. The contract cements the AI-factory model and signals Nebius’s ambition to climb the value chain from pure infrastructure provider to higher-margin cloud services. Separately, the company bought Eigen AI, completing its vertical integration from physical cooling to software that orchestrates GPU performance. The European angle matters, too: Nebius is expanding in the U.K. and building a massive data center in Finland, positioning itself as a sovereign alternative to Silicon Valley’s dominance.

That backlog now totals roughly $46 billion in multi-year commitments. In addition to Meta’s $27 billion, Nebius holds a $17 billion revenue contract with Microsoft and a $2 billion Nvidia commitment for GPU infrastructure through 2030. First-quarter 2026 revenue hit $399 million, up 684 percent year over year and ahead of the $391.6 million consensus. Adjusted EBITDA swung to $129.5 million from a $53.7 million loss in the prior-year period. Management reaffirmed its 2026 annualized revenue target of $7 billion to $9 billion and raised capex guidance to between $20 billion and $25 billion.

The financials tell a different story than the stock’s short-term volatility, but risks remain. Nebius’s capacity was fully booked in Q1, with management noting four or more competing customers for every new GPU. Yet the company relies heavily on a handful of giants — Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia — leaving it exposed to counterparty concentration. Insider selling over the past 90 days has been heavy, which in extreme growth phases is often shrugged off but still warrants scrutiny against a market capitalization of €53.5 billion.

The next inflection point comes in the third quarter. Capacity expansion is weighted to the second half of the year, with a meaningful step-up expected from Q3 onward. Aether 3.6 strengthens the product story, but the real test is converting that $46 billion backlog into cash flow. After generating only $529.8 million in total revenue in 2025, analysts project roughly $3.4 billion for 2026 and $11 billion for 2027. Whether the infrastructure comes online on schedule will determine how much of those forecasts becomes reality.