Nebius’ High-Wire Act: $643 Million AI Bet and $50 Billion Backlog Collide With Insider Selling Ahead of Earnings

Nebius stock surges 133% in 2025 on AI deals, but $15M insider sales and a $2.1B revenue rival's loss raise profitability concerns ahead of Q1 earnings.

Nebius heads into its first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday with a narrative split in two. The stock has surged 133% since the start of the year to around $177, propelled by massive cloud infrastructure deals and an aggressive pivot into artificial intelligence. Yet behind the rally, senior executives have been quietly cashing out. Insider sales over the past three months totalled more than $15 million, with director Elena Bunina alone selling a third of her holdings in early May. All transactions were executed through pre-arranged trading plans, but the scale of the exit has injected a note of caution into a stock that already carries a premium valuation.

The company’s transformation from a pure infrastructure provider into a higher-margin AI platform is accelerating. For $643 million, Nebius has acquired the startup Eigen AI, adding software that optimises hardware performance for inference — the part of AI computing that now accounts for roughly two-thirds of total demand. The acquisition complements an earlier purchase of the AI search platform Tavily and dovetails with the “Token Factory” strategy, a push to deliver more throughput at lower cost. A recent Nvidia certification for training on the latest GPU generation further burnishes the technological credentials.

But the capital intensity of this shift carries clear risks. Rival CoreWeave last week offered a stark reminder, reporting first-quarter revenue of $2.1 billion but a net loss that ballooned to $740 million. Its shares fell as much as 10% in after-hours trading, signalling that investors are no longer satisfied with top-line growth alone. Nebius must prove it can scale profitably, and its own earnings will be scrutinised as a bellwether for the entire neocloud space. Analysts expect Nebius to post revenue of $375 million for the first quarter, alongside an expanded per-share loss.

The company does have substantial financial backing. Its contracted backlog has swelled to nearly $50 billion, anchored by a $17.4 billion GPU infrastructure deal with Microsoft and a separate agreement with Meta that was expanded in March to as much as $27 billion. Management has said that more than 60% of this year’s planned capital expenditure — which could exceed $20 billion — is covered by customer prepayments, significantly reducing the dilution risk for existing shareholders. The Eigen AI team is also establishing a new research hub in California, deepening Nebius’ U.S. footprint.

Despite the order book, governance concerns persist. Founder Arkady Volozh controls 52% of voting rights through a family trust, making Nebius a “controlled company” under Nasdaq rules and exempting it from certain board independence requirements. The company itself disclosed material weaknesses in internal controls over financial reporting for the past fiscal year, particularly around revenue recognition in its TripleTen division. Management has pledged to fix these issues by the end of 2026, but until then the risk of undetected accounting errors remains elevated.

Wall Street remains divided. Citi points to the scaling potential of Nebius’ AI data centres, while Freedom Capital Markets downgraded the stock to “hold” after the recent rally. Wolfe Research has flagged financing risks, noting that the sheer size of the investment programme could strain the balance sheet if customer commitments falter. The key metric to watch on Wednesday is the annualised recurring revenue run rate. If Nebius misses its target range of $7 billion to $9 billion, the shares could face a sharp correction, regardless of the headline revenue beat.