$10,000 in Nebius When It Returned to Trading in 2024 Is Worth About $105,000 Now

Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS) has one of the most unusual recent histories in the market. The stock was halted in February 2022, back when the company was still called Yandex. It didn't trade again until Oct. 21, 2024, once the Russian side of the business had been sold off.

Shares closed their first day back at $20. A $10,000 stake bought at that close has grown into about $105,000 in under two years, with the stock at about $209 as of this writing. And the run hasn't even been smooth: Shares peaked at $299.86 within the past year, about 43% above where they trade now.

Here's a closer look at what earned the run.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

The deals behind the run

Nebius came back to the market as an artificial intelligence (AI) cloud company, renting out computing power from large clusters of graphics processing units (GPUs) to companies building AI products, from start-ups to some of the biggest names in tech. What it didn't have yet was a customer list to match its ambitions.

That changed quickly. In December 2024, the company raised $700 million in a private placement at $21 per share. The buyers included Accel and Nvidia -- the same company whose chips fill Nebius' data centers.

The contracts followed. In September 2025, Microsoft signed a multi-year deal for dedicated capacity at a new Nebius data center in Vineland, New Jersey. That agreement is worth about $17.4 billion through 2031, and up to $19.4 billion if Microsoft adds services or capacity.

And in March, Meta Platforms committed to a five-year agreement that could reach about $27 billion. In total, management says the company now has more than $40 billion in customer commitments.

The reported numbers are catching up

The first of those contracts is starting to show up in the income statement, too.

Showing how quickly contracted capacity turns into sales once it comes online, Nebius grew its second-quarter revenue 454% year over year to $582.3 million, up from $105.1 million a year earlier and 46% above the first quarter's total. On a non-GAAP (adjusted) basis, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) swung from a $21.0 million loss a year ago to $236.2 million in the second quarter -- an impressive 41% margin for a company spending this heavily.

That margin is the part of the report I find most telling. It arguably means the data centers Nebius already operates cover their costs, before depreciation on all that hardware -- the heavy spending is about capacity that hasn't arrived yet. In other words, the model appears to work where it's actually up and running.

Can revenue keep up with the spending?

Revenue isn't keeping up with the spending yet, and for now the gap is deliberate.

First-quarter capital expenditures came to about $2.5 billion. They more than doubled from there, reaching around $5.7 billion in the second quarter.

For the full year, management expects capital expenditures of $20 billion to $25 billion against guided revenue of $3 billion to $3.4 billion, with customer prepayments expected to cover more than $9 billion of the bill. That works out to spending about seven times the revenue the company expects to report this year.

Nebius can afford the gap for a while. It held $8.0 billion of cash at the end of June (some of it raised by selling new stock), and an August convertible-note sale brought in $5.75 billion more. Of course, a spending plan this size will likely mean more fundraising, and more debt or stock with it.

After all, much of the contracted capacity simply isn't built yet. The Meta capacity, for example, isn't slated to start coming online until early 2027. And revenue may trail the spending until more of those sites switch on.

Ultimately, the tenfold move wasn't luck. Nebius signed up some of the world's largest technology companies early, and the capacity due so far has been delivered on schedule.

But that history is already in the price. In short, today's buyer is paying about $209 for revenue that mostly arrives in 2027 and beyond, funded by spending that dwarfs this year's sales.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.