Nebius reveals AI capacity pricing for mid-term and short-duration deals

Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS) has disclosed pricing for its AI compute capacity, with rates ranging from $20 million to $50 million per megawatt. The spread reflects deal duration, with shorter-term agreements commanding a significant premium over multi-year contracts.

Short-term compute capacity is trading at a premium because supply constraints remain real. Companies that need GPU clusters now, rather than in 18 months when new data centers come online, are willing to pay for that immediacy. Nebius appears to be capturing that urgency in its pricing structure.

For context on what these numbers mean at scale: if Nebius connects its targeted one gigawatt of power capacity by the end of 2026, even at the lower end of its pricing range, the revenue potential becomes substantial very quickly. One gigawatt is one thousand megawatts.

Analyst estimates suggest the company could generate annual recurring revenue of between $4 million and $11 million per megawatt, depending on utilization. That ARR figure sits well below the headline capacity price because it accounts for the ongoing subscription nature of cloud contracts rather than the upfront capital value of the infrastructure itself.

The contracts anchoring Nebius’s growth story

A deal with Microsoft, valued at approximately $17 billion, provides a significant revenue foundation. A separate arrangement with Meta carries potential commitments that could reach $27 billion over five years.

The company’s strategic alliance with NVIDIA adds another layer of credibility. Access to cutting-edge GPU hardware is not trivially easy for every data center operator. Nebius’s relationship with NVIDIA, the dominant supplier of AI accelerators, positions it to offer the specific hardware configurations that large-scale AI training and inference workloads require.

The company is actively expanding data center capacity across both Europe and the United States, with an ambition to connect more than one gigawatt of power capacity before the end of 2026.

From Yandex to AI infrastructure giant

The group rebranded from Yandex N.V. in August 2024, shedding its identity as the Russian internet conglomerate it had been for decades. Nebius repositioned itself as a pure-play AI cloud infrastructure business. The rebrand also allowed Nebius to pursue institutional capital and large enterprise contracts without carrying the geopolitical weight of the Yandex brand.

What to watch from here

The $20 million to $50 million per megawatt pricing disclosure is useful, but the more interesting number over the next several quarters will be utilization. Capacity pricing tells you what Nebius can charge. Utilization tells you what it actually earns.

Stock price volatility has tracked closely with capacity announcements and contract news. Analyst price targets in optimistic scenarios have reached as high as $400, reflecting the wide range of possible outcomes in a market where the underlying demand curve is clear but the competitive dynamics are still settling.

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