Nebius Surges 11% Pre-Market, Former OpenAI Researcher Aschenbrenner Bets Big

TradingKey - Dutch cloud computing service provider Nebius Group ( NBIS) saw its pre-market share price surge by as much as 11%. The core catalyst for this rally was a significant equity disclosure: Situational Awareness, an investment firm founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, revealed in a regulatory filing that it holds 12.4 million Class A ordinary shares of Nebius, a 5.6% stake that makes it one of the company's largest institutional investors.

Aschenbrenner rose to prominence following a 2024 article predicting that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) could emerge around 2027. The core investment thesis of his fund, Situational Awareness LP, is betting that the rapid development of AI will drive explosive demand for computing infrastructure, including chips, data centers, and power.

Amsterdam-based Nebius Group is considered a hidden champion in the AI computing space. Spun off from the Russian internet giant Yandex, it has evolved into a core AI infrastructure provider in Europe.

The company focuses on the deployment of GPU computing clusters, providing underlying support for the training and operation of AI models like ChatGPT, and maintains a deep strategic partnership with NVIDIA.

In March this year, Nebius secured two major partnerships in quick succession. First, it reached a computing supply agreement with Meta ( META) with a total value of $27 billion, under which it will provide $12 billion in dedicated computing resources and up to $15 billion in incremental computing support for Meta's development over the next five years.

This was immediately followed by a strategic investment from NVIDIA ( NVDA) totaling $2 billion. The two parties will collaborate in areas such as AI infrastructure construction, computing operations and maintenance, and industrial park planning.

This capital injection from a former core member of OpenAI undoubtedly adds significant weight to Nebius' growth narrative.

Notably, Nebius' stock price has skyrocketed 149% year-to-date. The company's latest financial data shows that its transformation is yielding significant results; in its first report marking a profitability inflection point, revenue reached $399 million—a staggering 684% year-over-year surge—while net income reached an impressive $621 million.

However, the market is also monitoring the sustainability of Nebius' growth. While the AI infrastructure sector is currently thriving, competition is set to intensify as giants like AWS and Microsoft Azure accelerate their presence. Whether Nebius can leverage its first-mover advantage and technological barriers to sustain high growth will be a key metric for investors to watch.