Nebius Beats Q3 Estimates With $980.8 Million Revenue, Then Loses 16 Percent as Its 2027 Capex Plan Hits $40-45 Billion

Nebius reported record third-quarter results on Thursday — revenue of $980.8 million, up 571 percent year over year and above the $907.5 million analyst consensus — and its stock still fell sharply, closing down about 17 percent at $128.64. The reason was not the quarter but the bill attached to it: the Amsterdam-based AI cloud raised its 2026 capital spending forecast to roughly $27 billion and said it expects to spend $40 billion to $45 billion in 2027, far above the $28.8 billion or so analysts had modeled.

The operating numbers were strong across the board. The core AI Cloud business brought in $973.8 million, about 99 percent of group revenue. Adjusted EBITDA swung to $465.8 million from a $5.2 million loss a year earlier, a 47.5 percent margin, and the net loss from continuing operations narrowed to $37.5 million, or 13 cents a share. Adjusted earnings came in at 31 cents against expectations of a 69-cent loss. The company ended the quarter with $7.4 billion in cash and said customers had signed more than $12 billion in contract value since the start of the quarter.

But the quarter was flattered by one-time items, and the outlook absorbed the market's attention. About $325 million of revenue came from an asset-light partnership model in which partners fund the capacity and Nebius deploys its platform on it. Third-party data-center capacity expected to switch on this year, including remaining New Jersey tranches tied to its Microsoft contract, has slipped into the first half of 2027. As a result, Nebius now expects 2026 revenue at the low end of its $3.0-3.4 billion range and pushed its target of $7 billion in annualized run-rate revenue back to February.

Management's answer to the who-pays-for-this question is that customers increasingly do. More than 90 percent of contracts signed this quarter carry prepayments, and those prepayments now cover more than 100 percent of the capital cost of the associated projects, up from 50-60 percent in the second quarter. Nebius booked $5.75 billion of convertible notes in August on top of a $775 million asset-backed facility priced at SOFR plus 250 basis points, and new capacity deals are clearing above $25 million per megawatt. CEO Arkady Volozh acknowledged that capital markets have been unsettled lately but insisted demand is real and large and that building and financing capacity are problems that can be solved, reiterating a pre-tax breakeven target for the fourth quarter of 2027.

The sell-off, one day after CoreWeave's results briefly sent the neocloud complex soaring, shows what investors are now pricing: each dollar of next year's revenue requires several dollars of debt-financed data centers and chips today. With long-term borrowing costs elevated and a neocloud ETF down more than 40 percent since September, the market reads the funding line before the revenue line. Nebius is still growing faster than almost anyone in infrastructure — but it now has to prove the financing math works at $45 billion a year, not just describe the demand.