Nebius's 11% Drop: The $44 Billion Backlog, a 1.2 GW Power Deal, and Why the Market Pressed Pause

Nebius shares fell 11% on macro headwinds but are still up 159% YTD. Q1 revenue surged 684% to $399M, with a $44B contract backlog from Meta and Microsoft driving long-term growth.

It looked like a rout. On Friday, shares of Nebius tumbled more than 11% to close at €197.90, erasing weeks of gains in a single session. But the sell-off tells only half the story behind a stock that has still surged 159% since the start of the year and nearly 390% over the past twelve months.

The trigger came not from the company itself, but from the macro calendar. Stronger-than-expected US jobs data pushed expectations for Federal Reserve rate cuts further into the future, while markets braced for a possible rate increase from the European Central Bank in the coming week. A cautious outlook from a major US chipmaker added to the pressure, and European technology names bore the brunt. Nebius, with an annualized 30-day volatility of 136%, was hit especially hard.

Yet the underlying business momentum has rarely looked stronger. Revenue in the first quarter of 2026 jumped 684% year-over-year to $399 million, handily beating consensus estimates. Operating EBITDA came in at $129.5 million, meaning the company is generating profits even as it pours capital into expansion. Management has guided for an annualized revenue run rate of between $7 billion and $9 billion for the full year 2026 — a leap of roughly 540% from the $1.25 billion annualized figure in 2025.

The bedrock of that growth is a contract backlog that the company puts at $44 billion, anchored by a five-year deal with Meta Platforms worth up to $27 billion and a $17 billion compute agreement with Microsoft for dedicated AI capacity. Some sources have reported the total contract value at over $46 billion. Either way, it provides multi-year revenue visibility that few peers can match.

Turning those paper commitments into real revenue requires enormous amounts of energy, and Nebius has addressed that bottleneck head-on. The company secured land and 1.2 gigawatts of power capacity in Pennsylvania for a new "AI Factory" — the kind of hyperscale project that is increasingly constrained by power availability. That move, analysts say, is critical to converting the backlog into operating income.

Nebius is also building a software layer to differentiate itself from pure GPU providers. In the first quarter, it acquired three technology firms — Tavily, Eigen AI, and Clarifai — to strengthen its "Token Factory" and inference optimization services. The goal is to offer a full cloud platform for developers and enterprises, from raw compute to integrated software.

Technically, the stock remains 32% above its 50-day moving average after Friday's retreat, and the relative strength index has settled to 56.2, exiting the overbought territory of recent weeks. The zone between €190 and €200 is being watched as a potential stabilization base.

One development that has drawn attention is an insider sale. CTO Danila Shtan disposed of 15,678 shares on June 4, shortly after the stock hit a 52-week high of €242.95. Whether that signals a loss of confidence or simple profit-taking will become clearer in the weeks ahead as new data center capacity in the US and Europe starts contributing to revenue.

The coming days also offer a window into Nebius's ecosystem positioning. On June 8, the company appears alongside Nvidia as a sponsor at Geektime Code 2026 in Tel Aviv. The following day brings an exclusive investor meeting, "Nebius Inflection," in the United States. And on June 10–11, Nebius is an industry partner at the AI Summit London. These events are as much about reinforcing relationships with hyperscalers and tech partners as they are about publicity.

For now, the macro headwinds — the ECB's decision and further US economic data — will determine whether Friday's decline was a brief squall or the start of a deeper consolidation. Nebius has built the fundamentals to weather the storm, but the market's mood may prove the bigger variable.