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NBIS Hits All-Time High of $214.44 on Blowout Q1 Results
Nebius Group N.V. (NASDAQ: NBIS) surged as much as 17.9% to an all-time high of $214.44 on May 13, 2026, after the Amsterdam-headquartered AI cloud company delivered first-quarter results that obliterated market expectations on virtually every key financial metric. Revenue for the three months ended March 31, 2026 reached $399.0 million, a 684% year-over-year increase from $50.9 million in Q1 2025, driven entirely by an explosion in contracted GPU infrastructure capacity and deepening relationships with the world's largest technology platforms.
- Q1 2026 revenue hit $399M vs. $50.9M a year ago, beating analyst consensus of ~$389M by a wide margin.
- Adjusted EBITDA flipped from a loss of $53.7M to a profit of $129.5M, reflecting rapid margin improvement.
- Full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $3B–$3.4B anchored by a contracted backlog approaching $50 billion.
The stock entered the session trading near $180, having already gained more than 120% year-to-date. The earnings release, published before the opening bell, triggered one of the most dramatic single-session moves in NBIS's short history as a public company, with heavy volume amplified by more than 20% of the float held in short positions at the time of the report.
Margins Inflect as Operating Leverage Kicks In
The headline revenue figure drew immediate attention, but the Adjusted EBITDA swing provided the more structurally meaningful signal. One year ago, Nebius generated an Adjusted EBITDA loss of $53.7 million. In Q1 2026, the same metric reached a profit of $129.5 million — a transformation that reflects the operating leverage embedded in scaled AI infrastructure deployments.
The cost-of-revenue ratio compressed sharply, falling from 49 cents per dollar of revenue in Q1 2025 to just 26 cents in Q1 2026. Total operating costs as a percentage of revenue dropped from 336% to 132% over the same 12 months. Product development expenses rose 85% year-over-year in absolute terms but fell from 72% of revenues to just 17%, a structural efficiency profile that few high-growth infrastructure companies achieve at this pace of scaling.
Net income from continuing operations reached $621.2 million on a GAAP basis, primarily reflecting an $780.6 million gain from the revaluation of investments in equity securities. Adjusted net loss stood at $100.3 million, reflecting continued heavy investment spending. Earnings per share of -$0.23 crushed the consensus estimate of -$0.78 by 70%.
$50 Billion Backlog Anchors the Growth Runway
The Q1 performance is not a standalone event — it is the opening chapter of a contracted growth trajectory that gives Nebius exceptional revenue visibility. The company's contracted backlog stands near $50 billion, built from three landmark agreements with the world's most consequential AI spenders.
Meta Platforms expanded its GPU infrastructure commitment with Nebius in March 2026 to as much as $27 billion, making it the single largest publicly disclosed AI infrastructure deal in history. Meta's requirement for dedicated, sovereign-grade GPU compute to power its large language models and AI agent deployments underpins this commitment. Microsoft had already signed a five-year deal worth up to $19.4 billion in September 2025, directing a portion of its Azure and Copilot compute demand to Nebius's dedicated GPU clusters.In March 2026, NVIDIA (NVDA) invested $2 billion in Nebius, acquiring approximately an 8.3% stake through prefunded warrants. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang publicly described Nebius as essential infrastructure for what he termed the "agentic era" — the next phase of AI where systems perform autonomous multi-step reasoning tasks at scale.
Pennsylvania AI Factory Adds 1.2 GW of Dedicated Capacity
Alongside the earnings release, Nebius announced it has secured up to 1.2 gigawatts of power and land for a new, wholly owned AI factory in Pennsylvania — the company's latest and largest domestic capacity commitment. A day earlier, on May 12, Nebius broke ground on its flagship gigawatt-scale AI factory campus in Independence, Missouri.
The capital expenditure program spans nine new data centers and $16 billion to $20 billion in planned spending. Capital expenditures for Q1 2026 alone reached $2.47 billion, up 355% year-over-year, reflecting the pace at which Nebius is converting contracted demand into physical GPU infrastructure. Cash and cash equivalents surged to $9.3 billion at March 31, 2026, from $3.7 billion at year-end 2025, supported by $4.34 billion in convertible note proceeds and the $2 billion NVIDIA investment.
Eigen AI Acquisition Accelerates Platform Strategy
Two weeks before the earnings release, Nebius announced the acquisition of Eigen AI for approximately $643 million in cash and Class A shares. Eigen specializes in reducing the compute and memory requirements needed to run large AI models at inference scale — targeting one of the most significant cost bottlenecks in production AI deployment.
The acquisition moves Nebius further up the AI cloud stack, from a pure infrastructure-as-a-service provider renting raw GPU capacity toward a platform-as-a-service model built around its Token Factory managed inference product. The distinction carries meaningful margin implications: software-defined AI services command higher unit economics and deeper customer lock-in than commodity compute rental. The Eigen deal alone catalyzed a 12%–14% single-day gain in NBIS on its announcement date, signaling how the market interprets the company's move toward the platform layer.
Full-Year 2026 Guidance: $3B to $3.4 Billion
Nebius issued full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion, implying roughly 470%–540% growth over the $530 million posted for the full year 2025. The annualized run rate revenue for the core Nebius AI cloud business has already accelerated materially on a quarter-over-quarter basis — Q1 2026 revenue grew 75% sequentially from Q4 2025 — validating the guidance trajectory.
At the all-time high of $214.44, Nebius's market capitalization exceeded $40 billion. The stock trades at roughly 12–13 times forward 2026 revenue guidance — a high multiple, but one that reflects the scale of the contracted backlog, the speed of margin improvement, and the quality of the customer roster underwriting that revenue.
Twelve covering analysts maintained a consensus Strong Buy rating heading into the report, with price targets expected to be substantially revised upward following the Q1 print. The one-year gain in NBIS of more than 450% — from a 52-week low of $32.88 — reflects a market that has consistently repriced the stock higher with each successive confirmation of the company's operational and commercial trajectory. Tuesday's report delivered the most emphatic confirmation yet.
Mentioned tickers: NBIS, NVDA, META, MSFT
