Can this AI Cloud Challenger Take On the Giants?
Nebius is building a full-stack AI cloud platform with Nvidia’s backing, but faces growing competition from big beasts in the space.
Key Takeaways
Nebius is a pure-play AI infrastructure company backed by a $2bn investment from Nvidia.
The company is scaling AI cloud capacity rapidly, targeting 5GW by 2030 while expanding its global footprint.
Nebius offers high growth potential, but Meta’s ambitions and competition from CoreWeave and Oracle create risks.
Nebius [NBIS] has quite a convoluted history.
Formerly known as Yandex, it was once Russia’s biggest tech company. It started life as a search engine, then expanded to include e-commerce, music streaming and ride-hailing.
Yandex’s Amsterdam-based parent made its debut on the Nasdaq in May 2011, raising $1.3bn. However, in February 2022 it was suspended from trading due to Ukraine War-related sanctions on Russia.
Founder and CEO Arkady Volozh went into exile; the company sold its Russian assets to a consortium of buyers and rebranded. The phoenix that emerged from the ashes was Nebius.
Newly focused on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, and employing more than 1,000 former Yandex workers, Nebius resumed trading on the Nasdaq in October 2024. The company is thus an interesting proposition, combining the dynamism of a startup with the expertise of an established player.
Of course, it helps that its chosen field is one of the most exciting and fast-growing sectors in the world right now. It is a good time to be an AI-native cloud company, as the graph below suggests.
Nebius is well-placed to leverage this projected growth. “Nebius has been built for AI since day one – not adapted from a general-purpose cloud, but designed for what developers actually need,” as CEO Volozh recently framed it.
Investors seem to share Volozh’s conviction. NBIS stock is up 158.61% this year, and a hearty 1414% since it began trading in 2024.
What NVDA partnership means for Nebius
Talent recognises talent: on 11 March 2026, Nvidia [NVDA] announced that it was to invest $2bn in Nebius. This was a huge vote of confidence in what was, on paper, a new company.
“AI is at another inflection point – agentic AI, driving incredible compute demand and accelerating infrastructure buildout,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, announcing the partnership.
“Nebius is building an AI cloud designed for the agentic era, fully integrated from silicon to software and powered by Nvidia’s next-generation accelerated compute. Together, we are scaling the cloud to meet the surging global demand for intelligence.”
The partnership gives Nebius earlier access to Nvidia’s latest computing platforms, including future generations of hardware, while allowing the companies to work together on everything from AI factory design and deployment to software optimisation.
The link-up goes beyond chips. As demand for AI compute continues to outpace supply, the winners may be the companies capable of building and operating large-scale AI infrastructure efficiently. Nebius aims to deploy more than 5GW of AI capacity by 2030, and closer integration with Nvidia could help it design data centres, optimise performance and bring new capacity online faster.
The collaboration also extends into AI inference and agentic AI, where Nebius will use Nvidia’s software stack, optimised models and libraries to provide developers and enterprises with more efficient tools for running AI applications. In effect, Nebius is attempting to build a full-stack AI cloud platform that can compete not only on hardware availability, but on the software and infrastructure layers that determine how effectively businesses can deploy AI.
AI in the UK
In June, Nebius made an announcement that serves as a case study of how the Nvidia partnership is playing out in practice.
The firm said it was committing around £1.7bn to expand its AI infrastructure footprint in the UK, adding three new Nvidia-powered deployments as it grows its London-based commercial and AI research operations. The new sites are expected to bring an additional 65MW of capacity online by 2027, building on Nebius’ first UK deployment of Nvidia Blackwell Ultra infrastructure in late 2025.
The company already has customers running large-scale AI workloads in the UK, including fintech Revolut, which uses Nebius infrastructure to support AI systems for fraud prevention and customer service, and Prima Mente, which relies on the platform to train and deploy biological AI models focused on diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Challenge from Meta?
Nebius shares dropped around 12.4% following a 1 July Bloomberg report that Meta Platforms [META] was exploring plans to launch a cloud business aimed at selling excess AI computing capacity. The move reflects a broader push among technology giants to monetise the vast AI infrastructure investments they have made in recent years.
For Nebius, the development raises two potential concerns. Meta is already a major customer, meaning a shift towards using its own infrastructure could reduce reliance on external AI cloud providers. Meanwhile, Meta’s potential entry into the AI cloud market could create another well-funded competitor in an increasingly crowded space.
Recent news
Nebius recently launched AI Cloud 3.6, known as Aether, introducing the Nebius Echo AI agent, which allows users to manage infrastructure through natural-language commands, alongside enhanced security features and storage upgrades designed for production-scale AI workloads. The updates underline Nebius’s strategy of differentiating its platform through usability, automation and enterprise readiness rather than competing solely on access to computing power.
Then, in early July 2026, Nebius strengthened its AI cloud offering through a deeper integration with Saturn Cloud, making Saturn’s AI Token Factory platform available through the Nebius marketplace. The partnership allows customers to deploy managed model fine-tuning, serving and enterprise AI workflows directly on Nebius’ Nvidia-powered infrastructure without requiring complex manual setup.
As AI infrastructure becomes increasingly commoditised, Nebius is attempting to move up the value chain by offering a more complete stack, combining compute, software tools and enterprise-grade deployment capabilities.
And, alongside CoreWeave [CRWV], Nebius was added to the Nasdaq-100 in 2026, marking a significant milestone for two of the fastest-growing players in the AI infrastructure market. Inclusion in the index reflects their rapid expansion and rising importance within the technology sector, while also increasing their visibility among institutional investors and index-tracking funds. The move reflects growing investor recognition that AI infrastructure providers could become major beneficiaries of the AI boom.
Ahead in the cloud: NBIS vs CRWV vs ORCL
It’s worth quickly comparing Nebius’ fundamentals to those of two of its competitors in the AI cloud space.
CoreWeave is probably its closest peer, with a similar focus on providing AI compute infrastructure and GPU-powered cloud services. Oracle [ORCL], meanwhile, is a more established cloud provider expanding aggressively into AI workloads.
In short, Nebius offers investors exposure to a pure-play AI infrastructure story, with upside tied to its ability to scale capacity and differentiate its full-stack platform, although it remains at an earlier stage and faces execution risks.
CoreWeave represents a more advanced version of the same AI compute opportunity, with rapid revenue growth and big-ticket hyperscaler partnerships. However, investors must weigh its heavy capital requirements and reliance on continued AI spending.
Lastly, Oracle provides a lower-risk way to access AI infrastructure growth, combining its established enterprise software business with expanding cloud capacity and AI partnerships, though its larger size may limit the rampant growth potential compared with more focused AI cloud players.
Conclusion: The investment case for NBIS stock
Nebius has emerged as one of the more unconventional AI infrastructure plays, combining the heritage and technical expertise of a major technology company with the growth profile of a startup.
The investment case for NBIS stock rests heavily on whether Nebius can successfully convert Nvidia’s backing, expanding data centre capacity and growing customer base into a sustainable AI cloud business. Its various recent plays suggest the company is aiming to compete on more than just GPU availability, building a full-stack platform for the next generation of AI applications.
However, the opportunity comes with risks. AI infrastructure is becoming increasingly competitive, with established players such as Oracle and emerging specialists such as CoreWeave fighting for the same demand. Meta’s potential entry into AI cloud services highlights the threat from companies with enormous financial resources and existing AI infrastructure.
For investors, Nebius represents a higher-risk, higher-reward way to gain exposure to the AI infrastructure boom. If the company can scale efficiently and establish itself as a leading AI cloud provider, its growth runway could be significant. But its valuation and execution remain key factors to monitor as competition intensifies.
This is for informational purposes only. CMC Markets UK Plc does not recommend any specific securities or investment strategies. Investing involves risk and investments may lose value, including the loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results.