Nebius: Neocloud’s Revenue Jumps 454% YoY, Stock Rises 16%+

Nebius just turned in a quarter that looks absurd on first reading and even more absurd on the second. Group revenue climbed 454 percent from a year earlier to $582.3 million in the second quarter of 2026, while the core AI cloud business rose 514 percent to $574.9 million. Wall Street had been looking for about $557 million in total revenue. Nebius shares reacted fast, rising more than 15 percent; the stock is now up 131 percent this year.

That kind of growth is coming from a company that lives in a very specific niche. Nebius is headquartered in Amsterdam and sells AI cloud capacity, renting out GPUs plus the software stack around them. It sits in the same territory as CoreWeave, Crusoe and Lambda, and it also runs into the big public clouds. The company came out of the former Yandex N.V. after its Russian business was sold, and it was renamed Nebius Group in 2024. Arkady Volozh is still the founder and CEO.

The margin story is almost as striking as the top line. Adjusted EBITDA in the AI cloud segment was $285.7 million, equal to a 49.7 percent margin, up from 45 percent in the prior quarter and 24 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. At group level, adjusted EBITDA swung to $236.2 million from a $21 million loss a year earlier. Nebius says annualized run-rate revenue now stands at $3.0 billion, up from $1.9 billion at the end of March.

But the expansion is brutally capital-hungry. Second-quarter capex came to roughly $5.7 billion for GPUs, related hardware and data center buildout. The company ended the quarter with about $8 billion in cash and financed part of the push with a share sale that raised roughly $2.8 billion in gross proceeds, plus a $775 million secured debt deal signed in July. Nebius also says it expects more than $9 billion in customer prepayments this year and more than $40 billion in total customer commitments.

The contracts themselves are getting larger and the payback period is getting shorter. Nebius says it signed four deals in the quarter with average total contract value of more than $1 billion each. Around 70 percent of deals included prepayments covering 50 to 60 percent of related capex, which brought the expected payback period down to one year and ten months from a prior range of two to three years. The customer list includes Reflection, Cohere, an unnamed US AI lab, a large US quantitative trading firm, AMI, Basecamp Research and Higgsfield. Microsoft’s capacity commitments have been fully delivered, and the buildout for a second Meta agreement is due online in early 2027.