Nebius: The High-Stakes Race to Turn $8.3 Billion in Debt Into AI Dominance
Published on 04/24/2026 at 00:00 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The cloud computing battlefield is shifting, and Nebius finds itself at the center of a high-risk, high-reward narrative that pits explosive growth against a mountain of leverage. While Meta's $48 billion commitment to two neocloud providers has sharpened the debate, the real question for investors is whether Nebius can outrun its own balance sheet.
Growth at a Premium
The numbers are staggering by any measure. CoreWeave, the larger rival, currently generates ten times Nebius' annual revenue but is growing at a slower clip, with analysts forecasting 143% growth in 2026 and 89% in 2027. Nebius, by contrast, is expected to post 523% revenue growth this year and 206% in 2027, catapulting sales from $530 million at the end of 2025 to roughly $10 billion by the end of 2027. Management's own target is an annualized revenue run rate of $7 billion to $9 billion by late 2026.
But that velocity comes at a cost. Nebius' enterprise value sits at roughly half of CoreWeave's, despite CoreWeave being on track to generate nearly four times the revenue this year. The implicit valuation premium for Nebius can only be justified if the company converts its massive backlog into actual revenue and scales its data center capacity from 170 megawatts at the end of 2025 to between 800 megawatts and 1 gigawatt by year-end.
The Full-Stack Bet
Both companies are racing to build GPU infrastructure for AI workloads, but their strategies diverge sharply. CoreWeave focuses on renting out GPU compute power to existing AI infrastructure. Nebius takes a full-stack approach, offering everything from raw compute to development environments in a single package.
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That sounds like a competitive advantage, but it demands an aggressive capital commitment. In March, after closing the Meta deal, Nebius took on $8.3 billion in debt — more than tripling its liabilities from the end of 2025. The net loss for the past year hit $447 million, an 87% increase from 2024. For 2026, the company plans capital expenditures between $16 billion and $20 billion.
CoreWeave lost $1.2 billion, a 35% increase year-over-year — larger in absolute terms but more moderate relative to its size. The specter of further equity dilution also hangs over Nebius, with additional share sales potentially weighing on existing holders.
GPU Pricing Provides a Tailwind
A structural shift in GPU pricing is working in both companies' favor. The rental price for Nvidia's B200 GPUs rose 24% in March to an average of $5.09 per hour, reversing a decline earlier in the year. At the peak, some contracts are fetching over $6 per hour. B200 and GB200 hardware is sold out through mid-2026, and Nvidia is sitting on a backlog of roughly 3.6 million units.
This pricing power lowers the bar for Nebius' ambitious revenue targets, since less hardware is needed to generate the same income. Customers are increasingly locking in capacity well in advance, with prepayments and longer contract terms becoming the norm. In the fourth quarter, new agreements lengthened by nearly half, underscoring the tightness in the AI infrastructure market.
The Profitability Crossroads
Despite the improving margin outlook, Nebius remains deep in the red. The operating margin stands at negative 103%. The massive capital outlays will keep free cash flow negative for quarters to come, and the company has already issued billions in convertible bonds to fund the build-out.
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Alger Capital, in its first-quarter 2026 investor letter, highlighted Nebius as a notable contributor, pointing to the company's first-ever positive adjusted group profit as a milestone. Whether that marks the beginning of sustainable profitability or proves to be an outlier will be determined by the next quarterly report.
Management has guided for 2026 revenue of $3 billion to $3.4 billion and an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 40%. The backlog — anchored by Microsoft's multi-year deal worth up to $19.4 billion and Meta's expanded commitment of up to $27 billion — provides a strong foundation. But those commitments only deliver value if the infrastructure comes online on schedule.
Nebius plans to more than double its number of data centers by year-end. The next earnings release, due in the coming weeks, will provide the first hard data point on whether the company can make the leap from blistering revenue growth to genuine profitability — or whether the debt load proves too heavy to carry.
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