Nebius, a Netherlands‑based AI infrastructure and “
neocloud” provider, is using huge long‑term contracts with Microsoft and Meta to finance and accelerate a rapid global build‑out of GPU data centers, especially for AI workloads in the US and Europe.
What the new contracts are
Nebius signed a five‑year AI infrastructure agreement with Microsoft worth about
17–17.4 billion dollars, with options that could lift the value close to
19.4 billion dollars.
It later added a separate five‑year AI infrastructure deal with
Meta valued at roughly 3 billion dollars, limiting the size to its currently available capacity due to strong demand.
How Nebius is leveraging them
The
Microsoft and Meta contracts give Nebius locked‑in, multi‑year revenue streams that it explicitly treats as a way to fund aggressive expansion of its core AI cloud business in 2026 and beyond.
Nebius is using this financing to invest heavily in
Nvidia GPUs, land, and power, with capital expenditure in the latest quarter jumping to around
955 million dollars from about 172 million dollars a year earlier.
Expansion plans and target customers
Nebius plans to scale data center power capacity toward roughly multi‑gigawatt levels by 2026, focusing on facilities in the US and several European countries such as the UK, Iceland, Finland, and France.
While hyperscalers like Microsoft and Meta are anchor tenants, Nebius is also targeting AI‑first startups and digital companies in sectors like pharma, hedge funds, manufacturing, retail, and finance, positioning itself as Europe’s leading “neocloud” GPU provider.
Business model and strategy
Nebius emphasizes margins over pure revenue volume when cutting deals with hyperscalers, aiming to use a few large, profitable contracts to underwrite broader capacity growth.
By offering high‑performance GPU infrastructure plus software tooling for AI workloads, Nebius competes with traditional data center operators and US hyperscalers, while benefiting from ongoing capacity constraints at big cloud providers.
