Nebius Stock: A $250 Billion Ambition, a Palantir Seal, and the Kremlin's Ire
Published on 09/12/2026 at 02:40 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Two narratives are pulling at Nebius these days, and only one of them shows up in the share price. The first is the well-worn AI infrastructure story — capacity, capital, growth. The second is about lineage, war, and the awkward question of whom a company truly serves when its roots trace back to Moscow while its customers sit in Kyiv, Washington, and Tel Aviv.
On Tuesday, Nebius and Palantir announced a strategic partnership via joint press release. Under the arrangement, Nebius becomes Palantir's preferred sovereign-AI infrastructure partner, with its compute and cloud platforms integrated directly into Palantir's operating system for applied AI. Commercial Palantir customers gain access to Nebius capacity to train their own models. The stock responded with gains in the high single digits to low double digits over the following days — the kind of move that commands analyst attention.
The other narrative commands attention in Moscow, and it is far less comfortable. Nebius is the successor to the former Yandex N.V., founded by Arkady Volozh, who renounced his Russian citizenship and now holds Israeli nationality. Palantir, for its part, is a standing contractor to the Pentagon and the CIA and, according to Russian voices, deeply involved in planning Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory — Ukraine's military intelligence service uses Palantir's PRISMA platform to direct drones. In Moscow, this is no footnote: publicist Konstantin Malofeyev has publicly called for treason proceedings against Volozh, along with confiscation and a wanted notice. One war correspondent described Palantir as "combat AI that has been fighting Russia for five years." Such rhetoric does not move Nasdaq prices, but it illustrates how thoroughly the AI infrastructure boom has become entangled with geopolitical front lines.
A capital plan on the scale of mid-sized state budgets
Back to the numbers that actually move the market. At the Citi TMT conference, CEO Volozh put the capital requirement for 5 gigawatts of contracted AI capacity through 2030 at roughly $250 billion. About 20 percent — some $50 billion — is already financed; the remaining $200 billion is still open.
For scale: the second quarter delivered revenue of $582 million, up 454 percent year over year, against a 2026 capex guidance of $20 billion to $25 billion. The gap between what is earned and what is meant to be invested remains enormous.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Nebius?
Nebius intends to bridge that gap through customer prepayments — more than $9 billion expected to arrive in 2026 — supplemented by a GPU-backed loan of $775 million and an equity program targeting roughly $2.8 billion in gross proceeds. It is a clever financing web, but a web nonetheless: many small building blocks for a very large sum.
The quarter behind the headline
The second quarter confirmed the company's own forecasts while laying bare the sheer momentum of the AI cloud business. Group revenue climbed 454 percent to $582 million, up from $105.1 million a year earlier. The core AI cloud segment grew even faster, up 514 percent to $575 million — 98 percent of consolidated revenue. Adjusted EBITDA swung from a $21 million loss a year ago to a profit of $236.2 million, a 41 percent margin.
Management reaffirmed its 2026 outlook: an annualized revenue run rate of $7 billion to $9 billion, group revenue of $3 billion to $3.4 billion, and an EBITDA margin around 40 percent, with investments of $20 billion to $25 billion. The company also raised its target for contracted power capacity to 5 gigawatts by year-end — capacity that, according to the company, is sold out outright, with auction prices up 15 percent. Customer deposits are expected to exceed $9 billion in 2026, covering 50 to 60 percent of capital expenditure. During the quarter, Nebius closed four major contracts averaging roughly $1 billion each.
Nvidia in the background
In July, Nvidia disclosed a passive 9.3 percent stake in Nebius Group via a Schedule 13G filing. The position comprises roughly 1.19 million common shares plus about 21 million shares tied to a warrant from Nvidia's previously announced $2 billion strategic investment. Per the filing, the warrant could not be exercised before September 11, 2026; whether exercise has since occurred is not confirmed.
Volozh himself sold 46,627 Class A shares in early July at $235.45. According to the company, the sale served solely to settle withholding tax obligations under pre-set instructions from a restricted share unit agreement — not a signal of any strategic reassessment by management.
What the tape says
The stock trades at EUR 193.88, roughly 26 percent below its 52-week high of EUR 261.00 — a sign that at least some of the euphoria of recent months is being digested. At the same time, the shares remain 220 percent above their 52-week low, a reminder of just how extreme the swing range in this segment has become. On a monthly basis, the stock is down 12 percent, yet it has still gained 167 percent year to date. The distance to the 200-day moving average stands at 42 percent, suggesting the long-term uptrend remains intact despite the recent consolidation.
Anyone invested here is not primarily buying a business model with stable margins, but a wager on whether the world's hunger for compute grows faster than doubts about how to pay for it. The Palantir partnership gives Nebius visibility in a segment increasingly shaped by state and military interests — sovereign AI long ago ceased to be neutral marketing language. That is precisely why the stock remains a case in which technological momentum and geopolitical friction are inseparable.
The June acquisition of Eigen AI, a specialist in inference and model optimization, along with April reports — still unconfirmed — of talks about a possible takeover of AI21 Labs, suggest Nebius intends to keep expanding its portfolio. The central question for investors is unchanged: can operational momentum — driven by exploding AI demand, sold-out compute capacity, and billion-dollar customer prepayments — justify the current valuation over the coming quarters?
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