Back to top

Image: Shutterstock

Can Nebius' Open Compute Pricing Strengthen Its AI Cloud Growth?

Read MoreHide Full Article

Key Takeaways

  • Nebius introduces live GPU spot pricing and pay-as-you-go access to improve AI compute flexibility.
  • Its NVIDIA-powered AI cloud spans six European countries, with U.K. expansion supporting diverse AI workloads.
  • Nebius' Physical AI Workbench targets industrial uses, while customers report up to 40% less engineering time.

The rapid expansion of AI is driving unprecedented demand for GPU computing, yet high-performance infrastructure remains costly and hard to manage. Nebius Group N.V. (NBIS - Free Report) is addressing this challenge by introducing public live spot pricing for GPU compute. The initiative provides customers with greater visibility into computing costs and expands how they can access and pay for AI infrastructure. It also underscores Nebius' broader strategy to build a full-stack AI cloud powered by NVIDIA (NVDA - Free Report) infrastructure, expand its European footprint and support workloads ranging from model training to production inference and physical AI.

Nebius is broadening its AI compute pricing options with transparent spot pricing, reserve auctions, pay-as-you-go access and a pilot program that lets customers recover value from idle GPUs. This flexible approach caters to both short-term and ongoing computing needs, while clearer pricing helps customers compare providers, simplify purchasing and scale AI projects from experimentation to deployment. Nebius is building its AI computing footprint across Finland, France, the U.K., Spain, Estonia and Iceland, while evaluating additional deployment opportunities. In August, NBIS expanded its U.K. AI footprint with NVIDIA-powered infrastructure at Vantage's Newport campus, supporting diverse AI workloads.

NVIDIA partnership strengthens the full-stack AI cloud strategy. Its AI Cloud combines NVIDIA accelerated computing and networking with custom servers, machine learning tools, managed inference and infrastructure engineering. The company is also expanding its Physical AI Workbench with agentic workflows for robotics and industrial applications. Nebius reports customers have reduced engineering time by up to 40%. In June, NBIS announced approximately £1.7 billion of committed capacity buildout across four U.K. sites. Newport expands Nebius’ U.K. capacity while diversifying its AI cloud footprint.

However, Nebius faces intense competition from hyperscalers and specialized GPU cloud providers like CoreWeave (CRWV - Free Report) and Microsoft (MSFT - Free Report) , as transparent pricing alone may not provide an edge if rivals offer similar performance at lower costs.

Intense Competition Hurting NBIS’ Opportunities

CRWV recently took a major step in its global expansion strategy by entering India, announcing plans to develop 240 MW of AI data center capacity through a collaboration with AdaniConneX at its Taloja campus in Navi Mumbai. CoreWeave also expanded beyond GPUs with NVIDIA Vera and Vera Rubin, targeting agentic AI and inference workloads while deepening its infrastructure strategy. In September, CRWV launched Physical AI Field Engineering, an offering designed to help automotive, aerospace, robotics and other engineering teams build, validate and deploy AI throughout the engineering lifecycle. In August, CoreWeave secured a multi-year HRT deal to build an AI research platform powered by NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin NVL72 and Spectrum-X networking.

Microsoft capitalizes on AI business momentum and Copilot adoption alongside accelerating Azure cloud infrastructure expansion. In October, Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra powered by NVIDIA’s RTX Spark chip, alongside a new Windows Hybrid Intelligence framework, a redesigned Windows Search, expanded Copilot capabilities including local file access and new AI agent security features via Microsoft Execution Containers. Recently, Microsoft pledged an additional $2 billion in investment in the Gulf region, deepening its AI and cloud infrastructure commitments across the Middle East. In August, Microsoft announced that it delivered NVIDIA's first production Vera Rubin GPUs to its data centers.

NBIS Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Shares of Nebius have gained 105% year to date compared with the Internet – Software and Services industry’s growth of 10.7%.

Zacks Investment Research
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

In terms of price/book, NBIS’ shares are trading at 4.2X, higher than the Internet Software Services industry’s 3.6X.

Zacks Investment Research
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for NBIS’ earnings for 2026 has been revised upward over the past 60 days.

Zacks Investment Research
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

NBIS currently sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Published in