NE NEBIUS Loading... : Bullish and Bearish Analyst Opinions

Bought Nebius and CoreWeave as GPU lease rates went up during the AI sell-off. Both companies crushed earnings, with Nebius showing massive revenue growth, positive operating cash flow, and strong customer prepayments for future capacity.

The neocloud rental model is being validated as enterprise AI shifts toward sovereign/open rental compute. Nebius has already shown profitability and has a stronger chart trend, while CoreWeave is the largest neocloud and could follow.

He avoids Nebius and debt-ridden neoclouds because they take on too much debt; he cannot justify paying $250/$260 for Nebius given that debt load, preferring higher-margin semiconductor suppliers.

Debt-ridden neo-clouds like Nebius are unattractive. It is hard to justify paying high valuations for Nebius given the massive amount of debt they take on, making high-margin chip suppliers a better alternative.

Nebius is a more mature neocloud with revenue up 454% year-over-year, compounding about 50% quarter-over-quarter, and about $8B in cash. It builds custom GPU clusters for specific workloads, which positions it to do well as AI demand grows.

Leopold was forced to liquidate his public equity book at the bottom; his largest AI/data-center names have since ripped massively, including Nebius, Bloom Energy, SanDisk, CoreWeave, and Applied Digital, showing forced-selling capitulation marked major bottoms.

Kwon argues that the earlier worry about AI data center oversupply was wrong. Meta renting out data center capacity is actually a high-return business rather than evidence of excess supply. When data center operators CoreWeave and Nebius and server maker Super Micro Computer reported earnings, results surprised and their stocks jumped about 20%, confirming that AI infrastructure is still scarce and that the prior selloff was not driven by deteriorating fundamentals.

CoreWeave surged after AI spending drove faster-than-expected sales growth, with Q3 sales guided to $3.45B-$3.6B, a $104B backlog, and post-quarter customer commitments suggesting AI demand remains strong. Nebius also reported Q2 revenue that beat estimates and is up 193% year-to-date.

Nvidia's $500 billion financing deal with BlackRock and others is directing massive capital toward capex beneficiaries in the AI compute stack. Companies like Nebius, Coreweave, and Shaw are surging as a direct result of this capital inflow, with Nebius crushing its earnings.

Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI physical infrastructure thesis remains intact; hyperscaler capex and cloud revenue growth continue to surge, driving demand for memory, GPUs, and power infrastructure. The recent forced liquidation was due to excessive leverage, not a deterioration of fundamentals, and the sharp rebound in these stocks post-liquidation supports the view that the underlying demand story is strong, making current levels a buying opportunity.

Nebius looks really good all things considered, having staged a strong reversal and appears to be recovering well from prior dips.

Open-source models fundamentally shift margin percentage and margin dollars from the model layer to the infrastructure layer. If we are structurally short compute, margins at the model layer don't matter; the real value accrues to compute providers. Cerebras, Neoclouds, CoreWeave, Nebius, and Nvidia are direct beneficiaries of this shift.

Meta's announcement that it is open to selling excess AI compute and building a cloud business is a direct competitive threat to existing neoclouds. If Meta goes from being a massive purchaser of compute to a seller, it is a huge negative swing for companies like Nebius and Coreweave. The market is already pricing this in, with Nebius down 17% and Coreweave down 14% on the day.

Meta shares closed 8.8% higher in their biggest advance since January 29, while Corning shares fell 14% in their worst day since March 2020, CoreWeave shares tumbled 14%, and Nebius closed down 17%.

Nebius is a neocloud that rents out scarce AI compute at massive scale, with Q1 revenue up nearly 700%, NVIDIA backing of $2 billion, and multi-billion-dollar contracts from Microsoft and Meta. Its advanced permitting and regulatory approvals give it a strong competitive moat.

Prefer NEBIUS over CRWV as a relative AI infrastructure long — author cites stronger leadership team and cleaner balance sheet as differentiating factors, with both backed by Nvidia.