Nebius signs AI infrastructure deals with Meta worth up to $27 billion over 5 years

<p>By Aditya Soni and Toby Sterling</p>
<p>March 16 (Reuters) - Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure firm Nebius Group said on Monday it has agreed with ‌Meta Platforms to provide the social media giant with $12 billion worth ‌of AI computing capacity across multiple locations by 2027.</p>
<p>Under the agreement, Meta will also buy ​an additional $15 billion worth of capacity planned by Nebius over the coming five years if it is not sold to other customers, giving the contract a total value of up to $27 billion, Nebius said.</p>
<p>Last week, <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/">Nvidia</a> said it would ‌invest $2 billion to buy an ⁠8.3% stake in Nebius, which uses Nvidia chips in its data centers.</p>
<p>Nasdaq-listed Nebius shares, which closed at $112.50 on Friday, ⁠have risen 35% so far this year, giving it a market capitalization of $28.6 billion.</p>
<p>DATACENTER RACE</p>
<p>The deal is the latest example of U.S. tech giants' efforts to supplement their own ​AI data-centre ​build-outs by locking in scarce GPU ​and power capacity from "neocloud" providers ‌like Nebius.</p>
<p>Unlike large cloud firms that serve a broad range of industries, AI specialists like Nebius and U.S. competitor CoreWeave mostly focus on tech customers, but aim to become major cloud service providers in their own right.</p>
<p>Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said the latest Meta deal would help "accelerate the build-out and ‌growth of our core AI cloud business."</p>
<p>Nebius ​signed an initial $3 billion deal with Meta in ​November and a $17.4 billion deal ​with <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/organizations/microsoft/">Microsoft</a> in September.</p>
<p>In February, the fast-growing Nebius reported ‌a fourth quarter net loss of $250 million ​on revenue of $228 million, ​and said it expected revenue to hit an annualized run rate of between $7 billion and $9 billion by the end of this year, ​from $1.25 billion at the ‌end of 2025.</p>
<p>The company said on Monday that 2026 guidance remains ​unchanged.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru, Toby Sterling in Amsterdam; Editing ​by Bernadette Baum and Tomasz Janowski)</p>