Nebius Bets €8 Billion on French AI Hub as $27 Billion Meta Contract Fuels Expansion

Nebius shares surged then fell after unveiling €8B France AI data center, alongside $27B Meta contract and $20-25B capex plan, amid insider selling.

Nebius is spreading its capital across two continents with equal ambition. One day after unveiling a massive €8 billion data center project in northern France, the company's shares swung wildly as investors weighed a $27 billion contract with Meta against persistent insider selling and a daunting $20–25 billion capital expenditure plan for 2026 alone.

The French initiative, announced by President Emmanuel Macron on 1 June at the "Choose France" investment summit, will transform a former Bridgestone tyre factory in Béthune into a 240-megawatt AI-focused data center. Nebius is partnering with French firm Azur Datacenter on the redevelopment, which is expected to create around 120 direct jobs. The first 60-megawatt phase is slated to go live in summer 2026, making Béthune what local officials say will be France’s first operational facility dedicated exclusively to artificial intelligence.

The stock reacted sharply to the news. On 1 June, Nebius shares surged 14.5% to a fresh 52-week high, with more than 24 million shares traded — well above average. But the euphoria faded the following day: the stock opened at $272.13, oscillated between $260.66 and $282.65, and closed at $262.23, down 0.86% from the previous session. Volume dropped to roughly 11.7 million shares. The retreat came despite a blistering first-quarter performance that saw revenue hit $399 million, a 684% jump from $50.9 million a year earlier, and adjusted EBITDA climbing to $129.5 million.

Underpinning that revenue explosion are two anchor contracts that dwarf the French project in value. Nebius has struck a $27 billion agreement with Meta and a $19.4 billion deal with Microsoft, with cloud capacity deliveries scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026. Management is targeting an annualized revenue run rate of $7–9 billion by year-end, up from $1.92 billion at the end of March. Net income from continuing operations swung to $621 million from a loss of $104 million in the prior-year period.

To finance that growth, Nebius ploughed $2.47 billion into property, plant and equipment and intangible assets in the first quarter, ending March with $9.3 billion in cash. The company is now guiding for total capital expenditure of $20–25 billion for the full year, leaving a funding gap of $4–5 billion that has shareholders bracing for a possible equity offering. The Béthune project alone accounts for more than €8 billion of that outlay, and in Pennsylvania Nebius has already secured land and up to 1.2 gigawatts of power capacity for another AI factory.

Investor unease is compounded by a flurry of insider sales. Chief executive Arkadiy Volozh sold 33,358 shares in April at an average price of $103.73, reducing his stake by 3.7%. Director Elena Bunina offloaded 10,894 shares in May at $206.87, shedding more than half her holding. In total, insiders have disposed of $123.5 million worth of stock over the past three months. At $271 on 2 June, the share price hovered just below the 52-week high of $274.80, still miles above the year’s low of $34.72.

All eyes now turn to co-founder and chief business officer Roman Chernin, who is scheduled to participate in a fireside chat at the BofA Securities Global Technology Conference on 3 June at 22:20 MESZ. Separately, Nebius is showcasing its physical AI ambitions at the IEEE ICRA robotics conference in Vienna from 1–5 June, where it presented the newly launched Physical AI Workbench — a developer platform that bundles simulation, synthetic data generation and deployment workflows. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang endorsed Nebius as a key partner on the same day, naming it alongside Microsoft and CoreWeave as an early adopter of the Vera-Rubin architecture. The message from management is clear: the $8 billion bet on Béthune is just one piece of a much larger puzzle, but execution — and the ability to turn megawatts into revenue — will determine whether the story holds together.