Nebius Group inked a $3 billion pact with Meta on Tuesday. The deal hands the Facebook overlord prime AI infrastructure real estate for five years, just as Nebius flaunted a third-quarter revenue spike that could make a rocket blush.
Picture the scene: Nebius, the Amsterdam upstart slinging Nvidia GPUs like digital hotcakes, suddenly has Meta knocking with a check that size. It’s their second hyperscaler hookup, hot on the heels of a $17.4 billion Microsoft romance in September—because nothing says “committed” like back-to-back billionaire beaus.
Shares of Nebius (NBIS) jitterbugged up 5% before the bell, a polite nod to the windfall. Yet premarket trading turned into a seesaw safari, wild swings chasing a quarterly loss ballooned to over $100 million from last year’s measly $39.7 million shortfall.
Investors eyed the chaos with wry grins. After all, this year’s stock sprint quadrupled Nebius’ market value to $27.61 billion—proof that in AI land, losses are just future fortunes in fancy dress.
The Meta marriage underscores a hilarious truth: AI’s appetite for computing power rivals a teenager’s for pizza. Even titans like Microsoft and Amazon are gasping, their clouds clogged like rush-hour freeways, leaving nimble neoclouds like Nebius to play traffic cop.
Nebius isn’t complaining. Their core gig—dishing out graphics processing units and AI cloud services—has demand so feverish, the Meta deal got capped at whatever GPUs they could spare. They’ll roll out the red carpet capacity in the next three months, or risk Zuckerberg’s bots staging a sit-in.
Rival CoreWeave must be smirking from the sidelines, watching Nebius surf this wave. Both outfits thrive as the AI gold rush leaves traditional clouds in the dust, their hardware handouts a lifeline for firms chasing silicon supremacy.
Revenue? Oh, it leaped 355% to $146.1 million in the September quarter, a jump that whispers “exponential” while shouting “eureka.” Nebius now eyes $7 billion to $9 billion in annualized run-rate revenue by 2026’s curtain call, up from September’s $551 million—ambitions as lofty as a drone’s flight path.
But here’s the gut-punch garnish: capital expenditures exploded to $955.5 million, from $172.1 million a year ago. They’re snapping up GPUs, land, and power like a tech hoarder at a fire sale, betting big that AI’s hunger won’t quit before breakfast.
Will the Meta moolah morph losses into laughs, or just fund more frantic expansions? Analysts lean in, popcorn at the ready, as this neocloud narrative unfolds like a sitcom with spreadsheets.
One can’t help but chuckle at the irony of it all—companies pouring billions into machines that might one day outsmart the bill payers. Nebius, ever the plucky provider, rides the rollercoaster with a wink, turning AI’s voracious vibe into vault-filling ventures.
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