Nebius beats estimates as customers race to secure AI computing power

Aug 12 (Reuters) - Nebius beat quarterly revenue estimates on Wednesday as booming demand for AI infrastructure helped it land larger contracts and increase prices, sending shares of the cloud-computing company more than 15% higher in premarket trading.

 

The results, which followed forecast raises by larger rival CoreWeave, showed that AI demand at the so-called neocloud firms continues to outstrip capacity, supporting their plans to spend billions of dollars on new infrastructure.

 

Revenue at Nebius’ mainstay AI cloud unit rose nearly six-fold, powering overall sales to $582.3 million in the second quarter ended June, which beat estimates of $572.75 million, according to LSEG data.

 

Nebius is converting growing demand into "contracted, profitable growth", CEO Arkady Volozh said.

The Nvidia- powered AI cloud provider closed four deals averaging over $1 billion each during the quarter. Total contract value nearly quadrupled from the prior quarter, while new-customer contract values jumped more than ninefold.

 

Capital expenditures totaled about $5.7 billion during the quarter, topping analysts’ expectations of $4.7 billion, according to Visible Alpha, as Nebius continued investing aggressively in GPUs and data-center expansion.

 

Nebius said it could sell all of its planned 2027 capacity at current terms but was retaining some capacity to capture future demand.

It raised its contracted power target for the end of 2026 to 5 gigawatts from more than 4 gigawatts previously and said it expects to deploy more than 1 GW of capacity annually starting in 2027.

 

The company expects more than $9 billion in customer prepayments this year and said it has more than $40 billion in customer commitments.

Nebius’ shares have surged more than 130% so far this year.

(Reporting by Rashika Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)