The Amsterdam-listed AI cloud company Nebius Group had been trading near $18 per share just a year ago, a valuation that reflected its status as an early-stage infrastructure builder without the customer concentration to justify a premium multiple relative to established cloud competitors.
Monday’s announcement of a five-year agreement with Meta Platforms worth up to $27 billion changed that calculus entirely, with Nebius shares surging more than 14% on March 16 in a move that extended gains already accumulated following Nvidia’s $2 billion strategic investment in the company disclosed the previous week.
The deal’s structure is worth examining in detail: $12 billion covers dedicated AI processing capacity that Nebius will build and maintain specifically for Meta’s workloads, with an additional $15 billion available as supplementary compute access that Meta can draw on as demand scales.
Delivery is scheduled to begin in early 2027, with Nebius confirming that the capacity will include one of the first large-scale deployments of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, the next-generation architecture that Jensen Huang unveiled in detail during GTC on Monday.
For context around Nebius’s current financial position: the company’s balance sheet shows $3.68 billion in total cash against a levered free cash flow position of negative $3.61 billion, reflecting the capital intensity of building AI infrastructure at scale, with the company guiding for capital expenditure of $16 billion to $20 billion in the current year alone.
Analyst consensus prior to the Meta deal placed a price target of $154.73 on Nebius shares with a high target of $291.00, and the most recent formal rating action was a Buy initiation from Compass Point in February 2026 at a $150 target, figures that will almost certainly be revised upward following an agreement that transforms the company’s multi-year revenue visibility in a single transaction.
The deal builds on an already established commercial relationship, with Meta having signed a separate $3 billion agreement with Nebius previously, making the new contract a substantial expansion of a partnership that has clearly been deepening for some time before the public announcement.
Arkady Volozh, Nebius’s founder and CEO, has described the company’s strategy as securing large, long-term capacity contracts that accelerate the build-out of its core AI cloud Business, a positioning that prioritises revenue certainty over the flexibility of smaller, shorter-duration agreements.
The back-to-back milestones of the Nvidia investment and the Meta deal in the same week represent the kind of institutional validation that can compress a multi-year growth narrative into a single trading session, and Nebius’s trajectory from a company trading near single-digit multiples a year ago to a $27 billion contract counterparty illustrates how rapidly the infrastructure layer of the AI economy is consolidating around a smaller number of specialist providers.