Amsterdam-based AI cloud firm Nebius has signed a US$3 billion deal with Meta to provide infrastructure services over a five-year period.
The agreement marks Nebius’ second major contract with a hyperscaler in recent months, following a US$17.4 billion deal with Microsoft in September.
The Meta agreement highlights the accelerating demand for high-performance computing required to build and deploy large-scale artificial intelligence systems. Nebius said it would deploy the necessary capacity to support Meta over the next three months, but noted that demand was so high that the contract’s size had to be capped based on current available infrastructure.
Nebius is part of a growing cohort of so-called “neocloud” providers – companies offering specialised hardware and cloud capacity as a service.
Its core focus is delivering Nvidia GPUs and AI cloud services to businesses scaling their AI capabilities. The company has seen surging interest from enterprises as AI workloads outpace the available resources of even the biggest public cloud providers, including Microsoft and Amazon.
The Meta announcement coincided with Nebius’ third-quarter financial results, which showed a more than fourfold year-on-year increase in revenue, climbing 355% to $146.1 million. However, the rapid growth has come at a cost. The company reported a quarterly loss of more than US$100 million, up from $39.7 million a year ago, and a sharp rise in capital expenditure – from $172.1 million to $955.5 million – as it ramps up investments in GPUs, land, and power infrastructure.
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Despite the deepening loss, investor sentiment is clearly remaining buoyant, bordering on giddy. Nebius’ shares have surged this year, with its market valuation climbing fourfold to US$27.61 billion through the last market close. The company is aiming to achieve between US$7 billion and US$9 billion in annualised run-rate revenue by the end of 2026, up from its current ARR of roughly US$551 million as of the end of September.
As hyperscale AI infrastructure becomes an increasingly scarce and valuable resource, Nebius’ latest deal signals both the scale of opportunity in the neocloud market – and the eye-watering cost of seizing it.
