Nebius reports 514% surge in second-quarter cloud sales as AI demand accelerates

Nebius Group, the AI-focused cloud infrastructure company trading on Nasdaq, posted a 514% increase in second-quarter cloud sales, powered by demand for GPU computing resources across the AI industry.

The number is eye-catching on its own, but it’s actually a deceleration from the company’s Q1 2026 performance, where AI cloud revenue hit $389.7 million for an 841% year-over-year increase.

A revenue engine built almost entirely on AI

In Q1 2026, the company pulled in $399 million in total revenue, a 684% jump compared to the prior year. Of that, $389.7 million came from AI cloud services — roughly 98% of total revenue flowing from a single business line.

For the full year 2026, Nebius is guiding for revenues between $3B and $3.4B with an approximately 40% adjusted EBITDA margin. The company is also targeting an annualized run-rate revenue of $7B to $9B.

The deals fueling the rocketship

Two partnerships stand out as the structural pillars supporting this growth. The first is a long-term agreement with Meta valued at approximately $27B. The second is a strategic alliance with NVIDIA, which has enabled Nebius to rapidly expand its GPU cluster capacity across both Europe and the United States.

Mistral AI, the French AI startup that has emerged as one of Europe’s most prominent foundation model developers, is among the companies relying on Nebius infrastructure.

To support this expansion, Nebius has committed to a capital expenditure budget of $20B to $25B for 2026.

Context and competition in the neocloud race

Nebius describes itself as a “neocloud” player, a term that distinguishes it from legacy cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Neoclouds like Nebius, CoreWeave, and Lambda were purpose-built from the ground up for GPU-heavy AI training and inference.

The company’s origins trace back to Yandex, Russia’s dominant search engine. After geopolitical upheaval forced a corporate restructuring, the AI infrastructure division was spun off and rebranded as Nebius, listing on Nasdaq.

The Q2 2026 results are scheduled for full release on August 12, 2026. Nebius shares have experienced significant volatility tied to AI sentiment cycles, spiking after strong earnings and major contract announcements.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.