Dutch data center company Nebius has signed billion-dollar contracts with Microsoft and Meta this year. Its share price rose 248 percent, bringing its market value to over $25 billion. With partnerships for GPU capacity and data centers in Europe and the US, the company is positioning itself as a leading “neocloud” player.
In September, Nebius signed a $17 billion agreement with Microsoft, followed by a $3 billion contract with Meta. For a company that only became operational as an independent entity in early 2024, these are impressive achievements.
Co-founder Roman Chernin remains optimistic despite concerns about an AI bubble. “We are very bullish,” he says. According to him, the market for AI infrastructure could grow tenfold or even a hundredfold, as companies are only just beginning to deploy AI models that are themselves rapidly evolving. As a smaller player, Nebius is preparing for more challenging times by developing high-margin services. “We should be ready (for when) the winter will come,” says Chernin, who argues that Nebius can then act as a consolidator.
Europe’s largest neocloud provider
Nebius is Europe’s largest supplier in the ‘neocloud’ segment. The company provides access to the powerful but expensive graphics processing units (GPUs) required for AI applications. This involves more than just hardware. The software for effectively using GPUs and running specialized AI applications is also part of the package.
This puts Nebius in competition with traditional data center operators and American ‘hyperscalers’ such as Amazon and Google. The company recently launched Token Factory, a platform for scalable AI inferencing that supports more than sixty open-source models.
The US is the largest market by revenue and installed capacity, but Nebius also operates data centers in Europe. These include locations in the UK, Iceland, Finland, and France. In Paris, the company opened a GPU cluster with Nvidia’s H200 Tensor Core GPUs as part of a more than $1 billion investment in European AI infrastructure.
Margin over revenue
When negotiating hyperscaler deals, Nebius prioritizes margins over revenue. “We are thinking about it as a system, so we signed those (large) deals having in mind that we need to finance the rest,” Chernin explains. After the Microsoft deal, Nebius raised $4.2 billion through a public stock offering and convertible bond sales.
Its early customer base includes AI natives, such as France’s Mistral, the American code platform Cursor, and the German visual AI company Black Forest. According to Chernin, these companies are poised to become a new generation of major players. By 2026, the company expects growth from existing digital enterprises that are early AI adopters, such as Shopify, Prosus, and ServiceNow.
These companies have always relied on American cloud services, but see advantages in Nebius’ specialized AI options. After 2027, the company hopes to serve large industrial companies. “Where will Siemens and BMW go when they will need to adopt AI on a large scale?” Chernin wonders. Nebius’ ambition is clear: to remain relevant to that market.
By the end of 2026, Nebius aims to secure 2.5 gigawatts of contracted capacity for facilities in both regions. Capacity sold to European “neocloud” providers rose 211 percent to 414 megawatts in the first nine months of 2025, according to real estate advisory firm CBRE.