Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS) has climbed about 500% over the past year, turning into a go-to “AI warehouse” landlord for companies that need Nvidia’s most powerful chips. The company’s contracted backlog is roughly $47 billion—built largely on Microsoft and Meta
Nebius Group’s stock has already surged, but the momentum isn’t coming from a single headline—it’s coming from a business built around one urgent problem in AI: where do you put the chips.
Over the past year, Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS) is up about 500%. Social media has tied that run to a bigger claim—that the stock could have 10x potential—painting Nebius as something more than a traditional landlord. In practice, the company operates giant warehouses packed with Nvidia’s most powerful chips. For AI companies, the logic is simple and expensive: buying the chips outright can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Nebius rents the capacity instead—by the hour.
What makes Nebius different is how tightly it’s built for the task. The warehouses aren’t just storage. Nebius built them, owns the land, supplies the electricity, and configured everything from scratch specifically for AI. It also built software to manage the operation. aiming to spare customers from having to assemble “armies of engineers” just to get started.
That setup is reflected in the company’s contracted backlog, which is roughly $47 billion. It includes $17.4 billion from Microsoft and up to $29.9 billion from Meta. Demand is so intense that Microsoft and Meta signed long-term contracts and pre-paid $4.8 billion before the hardware was even fully built.
Still, the same forces that are driving Nebius’s growth can also change the terms.
The first risk is capacity. Microsoft. Meta. and Google are all building their own data centers. and that raises the question of whether they will lean less on Nebius once their internal infrastructure comes online. If that reliance shifts, even massive contracted figures won’t prevent a new round of negotiations from getting tougher.
The second risk is pricing. GPU rental pricing has collapsed in the past when new chip generations arrived. There’s no guarantee Nebius can re-contract on similar rates when its current fleet needs refreshing.
A debate over how this story looked before the latest wave of AI demand also sits in the background. Crossroads Capital said the following regarding Nebius Group N.V. (NASDAQ:NBIS) in its Q1 2026 investor letter: “Nebius Group N.V. (NASDAQ:NBIS): It’s worth pausing to remember where this one sat a year ago. When we first bought NBIS in late 2025, the bear case wrote itself. Nebius was a freshly re-listed carve-out of Yandex. operating a modest
data center with a few co-locations across Europe. and a customer book composed almost entirely of VC-backed AI natives and other small. unproven firms. No anchor customer. No enterprise counterparties worth the name. A small but growing fleet of Nvidia GPUs financed with cash the company was burning faster than it was generating. And the elephant in the room was that nobody had any real idea how the c….(Click Here to Read the Letter in
Detail).”.
The pitch today is that what once looked like a fragile customer base has been replaced by anchor demand and long-term commitments. The pushback is that big-tech capacity building and the history of pricing drops after each GPU generation could quickly reshape what “landlord” returns look like when the supply-demand picture turns.
And even as readers chase upside, the market reality is that Nebius is already tied to some of the world’s most aggressive AI buildouts—companies that are also planning to become less dependent on rentals over time.
Nebius Group NBIS AI data center GPU rental Nvidia chips Microsoft Meta backlog long-term contracts hedge fund investors