Q2 2026

Nebius: Neocloud’s Revenue Jumps 454% YoY, Stock Rises 16%+

co-written by eustella AI12. August 2026, 14:59

Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius. © Nebius

Dutch-based Nebius Group reported second-quarter 2026 results that came in well above analyst expectations. Group revenue rose 454 percent year-on-year to $582.3 million, while the core AI cloud business grew 514 percent to $574.9 million. Analysts had expected total revenue of around $557 million, according to Bloomberg. The Nasdaq-listed stock (NBIS) gained more than 15 percent in response; it is up 131 percent year to date.

What Nebius is

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Nebius is a so-called “neocloud” – a data center operator focused exclusively on AI workloads that rents out GPU capacity along with a full software stack to AI labs and enterprises. That puts it in the same field as US providers such as CoreWeave, Crusoe and Lambda, and in competition with hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

The company emerged from the former Yandex N.V.: after the sale of its Russian business, the remaining international holding was renamed Nebius Group in 2024. Founder and CEO is Arkady Volozh. Alongside the cloud business, which accounts for roughly 98 percent of group revenue, Nebius owns the robotics and autonomous driving company Avride, edtech provider TripleTen, and minority stakes in data provider Toloka and database company ClickHouse, which was valued at around $15 billion in a January 2026 round.

Profitability in the cloud business

Beyond growth, the margin trajectory stands out: adjusted EBITDA in the AI cloud segment came to $285.7 million, a margin of 49.7 percent – up from 45 percent in the previous quarter and 24 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. At group level, adjusted EBITDA reached $236.2 million, against a $21 million loss a year earlier. Nebius puts annualized run-rate revenue (ARR) at $3.0 billion, up from $1.9 billion at the end of March.

Set against that are substantial investments: capital expenditures in the second quarter alone amounted to roughly $5.7 billion for GPUs, related hardware and data center expansion. The company ended the quarter with about $8 billion in cash. The build-out is being financed through several channels: an at-the-market program placed 12.7 million Class A shares at an average price of $223.60 through the end of June, generating gross proceeds of around $2.8 billion. In July, Nebius closed its first secured debt financing of $775 million priced at SOFR plus 2.50 percent, backed by deployed GPU infrastructure and contracted cash flows from an agreement with an investment-grade customer. For the full year, the company expects more than $9 billion in customer prepayments and puts total customer commitments at more than $40 billion.

Four landmark deals, shorter payback

Nebius says it closed four contracts in the second quarter with an average total contract value of more than $1 billion each. Annual contract value came to $20-25 million per megawatt; for older-generation GPUs, the company says it pushed through pricing more than 30 percent higher than in the previous quarter. Around 70 percent of deals closed included prepayments covering 50 to 60 percent of the associated capex. That shortened the expected payback period to one year and ten months, down from a previous range of two to three years.

Named customers include AI startup Reflection, which will train and run its open-source models on Nebius, and Canadian provider Cohere. They are joined by an unnamed US AI lab and a large US quantitative trading firm. Other customers include AMI, co-founded by Yann LeCun, Basecamp Research and Higgsfield. Capacity commitments to Microsoft have been fully delivered, according to the company, and the build-out supporting a second Meta agreement is due to come online in early 2027.

Nebius again raised its target for contracted power by year-end – from more than 4 gigawatts to 5 gigawatts. From 2027, the company plans to bring more than one gigawatt per year into operation. New sites were added recently in the UK, Estonia and Finland.

Asset-light: the infrastructure belongs to the partners

In addition to owned data centers and colocation space, Nebius is introducing a third model designed to ease the capital intensity of its growth. Under what it calls an asset-light partnership model, partners build and finance the data centers themselves and run Nebius’s full software stack inside them.

The division of labor: partners provide land, buildings, power connection and hardware – and own those assets. Nebius contributes the cloud platform, systems architecture including reference designs, and the global go-to-market organization that brings the demand. For Nebius, that means high-margin revenue from capacity it does not have to pre-finance; partners in turn get a facility built to Nebius standards and a fast route into the AI cloud market. The company names capital and available capacity as the two central bottlenecks in the industry that the model is meant to address. Which partners are involved is not specified in the shareholder letter.

On the software side: inference is growing

At the product level, Nebius reports that production inference workloads on its managed platform Token Factory more than tripled, increasingly running on open models such as Kimi K3, GLM-5.2, MiniMax 3 and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra. The company acquired two inference optimization teams during the quarter, Eigen AI and Clarifai; the associated one-off share-based compensation costs of $115.9 million weighed on product development expenses. With the “Aether 3.6” release, Nebius also introduced Nebius Echo, an AI agent for controlling infrastructure in natural language.