Nebius Has 75% of 2026 Power Booked, But Meta's Cloud Play Raises the Stakes

Nebius Q1 revenue surged 684% to $399M, but shares tumbled 11% as Meta's new cloud venture threatens to compete with its largest customer-partner.

Nebius is operating at full throttle. The AI infrastructure builder has already signed contracts covering more than 75% of its anticipated electricity consumption for 2026, and its fourth-quarter compute capacity was completely sold out. First-quarter 2026 revenues jumped 684% year-over-year to $399 million, underscoring the insatiable demand for GPU-based cloud services. Yet the stock has tumbled nearly 11% in a single week, dragged down by a threat that comes from an unlikely source: its biggest customer.

Meta Platforms, which is in the middle of an AI infrastructure partnership with Nebius valued at up to $27 billion, is reportedly building its own cloud business. Dubbed "Meta Compute," the initiative would sell surplus GPU capacity to outside developers, placing the tech giant in direct competition with Nebius. The move has rattled investors, who worry that Meta could flood the market with cheap high-performance compute power, squeezing margins across the sector. The Nebius share price closed Wednesday at €201.35, well below the all-time high of €261.00 reached in late June.

The stock’s trajectory over the past year has been nothing short of parabolic — up 381% in twelve months — but the volatility is extreme. With an annualised volatility of more than 100%, the shares have swung wildly as the market tries to value a company burning through cash to build massive gigawatt-scale facilities. The Relative Strength Index sits at a neutral 47, and the stock trades nearly 77% above its 200-day moving average of €115.40, a gap that underscores how far the rally has run ahead of the underlying fundamentals.

Operating momentum remains strong: the order backlog is at record levels, and customer demand shows no sign of abating. But the bottleneck is no longer client interest — it is physical execution. Nebius must secure concrete, grid connections, and timely deliveries of Nvidia chips to bring new capacity online. The risk is purely operational: can the company turn its contracted pipeline into profitable revenue fast enough to justify a market capitalisation of €58 billion?

The emergence of Meta Compute adds a new layer of uncertainty. Meta would gain unprecedented insight into client workflows and could bundle compute capacity with its own AI models, locking in developers. Analysts warn that an oversupply of GPU clusters could trigger a brutal price war in the infrastructure market. Nebius will have to demonstrate that its own full pipeline can offset the margin pressure from a rival that also happens to be its largest partner.

For now, the sell-off looks less like an abandonment of the AI theme and more like a recalibration. Investors are weighing how much they are willing to pay for future earnings against the risk that a key customer becomes a direct competitor. Nebius has the capacity and the contracts. The question is whether it can convert gigawatts into real profits before the market’s mood turns decisively cold.