Friday’s 7.5 percent advance in Nebius shares to EUR 194.76 had little to do with the company itself. CoreWeave and IREN, fellow members of the so-called neocloud cohort, moved in lockstep, lifted by persistent demand for AI infrastructure and a broadly constructive tone across the group. The takeaway for investors is that Nebius increasingly trades as a proxy for an entire asset class rather than on its own news flow — a dynamic that cuts both ways when sentiment shifts.
That sector-level sensitivity is now colliding with a balance sheet that is being stretched in real time. Late last month, Nebius closed a convertible bond placement worth approximately $5.75 billion, upsized from its original announcement and split into $3.0 billion at 0.50 percent due 2030 and $2.0 billion at 4.50 percent due 2034. The company also agreed to exchange $400 million of existing notes for roughly 15.8 million Class A shares. Since the capital raise went through, the stock has added 9.6 percent.
The scale of that financing makes sense only against the backdrop of what Nebius is trying to build. Management now guides to capital expenditures of $20 billion to $25 billion for 2026 — a staggering figure for a company of this size, and one that explains why the equity has been so responsive to any news that eases access to funding. The annual general meeting roughly two weeks ago, which passed all proposed resolutions and handed management added flexibility in the capital structure, contributed another 6.1 percent gain to the share price. Both catalysts are now fully digested.
The fundamental case for the spending rests on second-quarter numbers released in mid-August. Revenue came in at $582.3 million, up 454 percent year over year and ahead of the $572.75 million consensus. The AI cloud business alone grew 514 percent and now accounts for 98 percent of group revenue. Adjusted EBITDA swung from negative $21 million to positive $236.2 million. Management reaffirmed its full-year outlook of $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion in revenue at an EBITDA margin of roughly 40 percent.
Backing that up is an order book that has thickened considerably. Four new AI cloud contracts, each with an average total contract value exceeding $1 billion, were signed, pushing contracted backlog to $40 billion. Nebius also raised its year-end target for contracted power capacity to 5 gigawatts from 4 gigawatts, and the first capacity auction for Blackwell chips cleared at prices 15 percent above the previous record. The company’s contracted electricity capacity target now stands at 5 gigawatts, up from an earlier 4 gigawatts.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Nebius?
Yet the same numbers that justify the optimism also fuel the skepticism. A company investing more in a single quarter — $5.7 billion — than it generates in revenue remains dependent on open capital markets for its survival. That dependency is the crux of the bear case, and it has begun to attract formal expression. On September 4, a Seeking Alpha analyst downgraded Nebius from Buy to Hold, citing the stock’s more than 120 percent rally and a valuation stretched relative to CoreWeave, after maintaining a buy recommendation since March. Passage Research went further in July, initiating with a Sell rating and a price target of $95 — a 49 percent discount to prevailing levels — arguing that GPU capacity constraints are easing and that a valuation of 16.7 times revenue is unsustainable. That call is now more than a month old and should not be mistaken for current market consensus, but the underlying concern about potential overcapacity remains a live debate.
The chart tells its own version of the story. At EUR 194.76, the stock sits roughly 25 percent below its 52-week high of EUR 261.00 while trading 264 percent above its September low. The 44 percent gap to the 200-day moving average underscores how far the equity has run ahead of its longer-term trend. Nvidia, which invested $2 billion in Nebius in March as a vote of confidence in the company’s technical depth, remains a supportive presence in the background — but that support is being re-priced daily as the neocloud group rises and falls in unison.
CEO Arkady Volozh is scheduled to face investors twice in the coming week: at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology Conference on September 8 and at Citi’s Global TMT Conference the following day. Such appearances rarely produce new numbers, but they serve as a barometer of sentiment at a moment when the market has already priced in a great deal of growth. The operational results justify part of the enthusiasm; the capital intensity and the growing chorus of valuation critics justify a measure of caution. Nebius remains a bet that demand and capacity expansion will stay in step — and if that balance tips, the valuation debate will quickly move from the margins to the center.
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