Nebius is spending aggressively on infrastructure even as its stock takes a beating from a one-two punch of competitive and legal pressures. The AI cloud provider raised its 2026 capital expenditure plans to between $20 billion and $25 billion, up from an earlier forecast of $16 billion to $20 billion, with the extra firepower earmarked for capacity already locked in by customer contracts for 2027. Yet investors have been heading for the exits this week, sending shares more than 27% lower over the past seven days.
The selling accelerated on Tuesday, pushing the stock down a further 6.31% to €175.00, with some session lows touching €174.14. That puts the equity nearly 33% below the all-time high of €261.00 set on June 22 — a dramatic reversal for a company that still shows a year-to-date gain of over 128%.
Two distinct headwinds are spooking the market. The first is the emergence of Meta Platforms as a potential rival. Reports that the tech giant plans to launch a service called “Meta Compute,” offering its own excess cloud capacity, have rattled the “Neocloud” sector as a whole. Nebius counts Meta as both a customer and a partner: in March 2026 the two companies struck a $12 billion deal under which Nebius will supply dedicated computing power from early 2027. In return, Meta committed to take up to $15 billion in capacity that Nebius had originally planned to sell to third parties. If Meta now begins undercutting independent providers like Nebius with its own cloud offering, margins across the industry could come under severe pressure.
The second overhang is a legal tussle in Alabama. Nebius faces a bid by local residents to halt construction of a new data centre in Birmingham’s Oxmoor Valley, with a temporary restraining order sought over noise complaints and alleged zoning violations. The case is now before Jefferson County Circuit Judge Javan Patton Crayton after Nebius successfully recused the previous judge, who had a relationship with the plaintiffs’ attorney. A hearing was held on Tuesday, and the judge’s ruling on whether to impose a construction freeze will be a near-term catalyst for the stock.
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Adding to the noise, a SEC filing from July 6 revealed that Nebius infrastructure chief Andrey Korolenko sold 33,871 Class A shares worth roughly $7.97 million on July 1. On its face that looks like a lack of faith in the company, but the transaction was an automatic sell-to-cover arrangement linked to the vesting of restricted stock units — a routine tax-withholding move over which Korolenko had no discretion. Multiple other insiders executed identical sales on the same day for the same reason.
Despite the turbulence, management is pressing ahead with a multi-pronged financing strategy to fund the expansion. Nebius is weighing asset-backed structures, traditional corporate bonds, and customer prepayments to avoid excessive balance-sheet strain. The company is also broadening its product mix with the launch of Saturn Cloud on its own marketplace, allowing users to deploy applications via self-service without waiting for individual support — a strategic shift from pure GPU leasing toward higher-margin software and inference offerings.
On the operational front, Nebius expects the adjusted EBITDA margin to swing noticeably through the year. The second quarter is likely to see a dip as investment outpaces utilisation, with a recovery in the third quarter and further improvement in the fourth as new capacity comes online. Full-year guidance remains intact: an annualised run-rate revenue target of $7 billion to $9 billion, total revenue between $3 billion and $3.4 billion, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of roughly 40%.
Beyond the financials, Nebius is ploughing ahead with three major European projects: a £1.7 billion data centre build-out in the UK, a 310-megawatt facility in Finland costing over $10 billion, and a 240-megawatt site in France. The company’s ability to execute these builds while navigating the Alabama legal case and the shifting competitive dynamics created by its own largest customer will be the focus of the coming quarters. The relative strength index has slipped to the 39.5–39.7 range, inching toward oversold territory, and the stock now trades about 9% below its 50-day moving average of €192.68. Whether the multi-billion-dollar investment push can outmuscle the Meta-related anxiety will likely hinge on how quickly the promised margin recovery materialises in the second half of the year — and on whether the Alabama court lets construction continue.
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