Nebius Earnings Preview: Revenue Seen Up Over 500%
Nebius Group will report third-quarter 2026 results before the US market opens on Thursday, 12 November, in one of the most closely watched earnings tests of the AI infrastructure boom. Wall Street expects revenue of roughly $905 million to $907 million, up more than 500% from a year earlier, and a loss of about $0.71 per share. A conference call is scheduled for 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time.
The Amsterdam-based AI cloud provider, listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker NBIS, has become a barometer for the neocloud firms renting out Nvidia graphics processors to companies racing to build artificial intelligence systems. Its report will test whether explosive revenue growth can survive the funding and delivery worries that have knocked the shares down by more than half from their peak.
Shares down by half after a brutal November
Nebius shares touched an intraday low of $113.30 on 5 November, about 62% below their year-to-date high of $299.86 and their lowest level since April. They have since rebounded over consecutive sessions to $141.45, up about 9.3% on the day at the time of the latest preview, but that still leaves them roughly 53% below the year's high.
The 5 November slide, a fall of 14.9% in a single day, followed reports that Microsoft was tightening its oversight of data-centre projects run by emerging cloud providers, including Nebius. The reports described no change to Nebius's own contract with Microsoft, but they rattled investors who were already questioning how neocloud firms would finance tens of billions of dollars of expansion.
The third-quarter numbers are therefore a checkpoint, not just a scorecard. Investors want evidence that new data-centre capacity is coming online on schedule, that customers are paying for it, and that the company can fund its build-out without endless rounds of borrowing and share sales.
What the numbers need to show
In the second quarter, Nebius posted revenue of $582.3 million, up 454% year on year and about 46% higher than the first quarter, beating market expectations. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation reached $236.2 million, a margin of about 41%, while the core AI cloud business approached a 50% margin. Even so, heavy spending on data centres, depreciation and interest left a net loss from continuing operations of about $190.4 million.
Management has held its full-year targets at $3 billion to $3.4 billion of revenue, with annualised run-rate revenue of $7 billion to $9 billion by the end of the year and a group adjusted EBITDA margin of about 40%. If third-quarter revenue lands near $907 million, the first nine months will total about $1.89 billion, meaning the fourth quarter must deliver at least $1.11 billion to reach the bottom of the full-year range. That makes the outlook for the fourth quarter, and any update to the year-end run-rate target, more important than the third-quarter figures themselves.
Investors will also watch customer prepayments, reported at more than $9 billion, and the contracted backlog, reported at roughly $40 billion.
Microsoft and Meta deals drive growth, and risk
Nebius's growth is built on two giant customers. Its contract with Microsoft is valued at about $17.4 billion and could rise to about $19.4 billion if Microsoft buys additional services. Meta has signed a five-year, $12 billion agreement for dedicated computing capacity, with delivery due to begin in early 2027, and has also agreed to buy spare capacity in some clusters for up to a further $15 billion, taking the potential scale of the partnership to about $27 billion.
That visibility comes with concentration risk. Three customers supplied about 24%, 21% and 14% of revenue respectively in the second quarter. If any of them delays a project, trims its requirements or stops ordering, short-term growth expectations could fall sharply. Microsoft also has the right to end some service batches if Nebius misses agreed delivery dates, after a grace period, and cannot provide alternative capacity.
Financing remains the other big question. Capital spending reached about $5.7 billion in the second quarter, and management expects $20 billion to $25 billion for the full year. Nebius raised about $5.75 billion through convertible senior notes in August and secured $3.5 billion in senior secured financing from Citi in October. Some contracts include prepayments covering 50% to 60% of the related capital spending, which eases the strain, but interest costs and possible dilution still weigh on shareholders.
Wall Street remains broadly optimistic about the longer term. Thirteen analysts tracked by TipRanks carry an average price target of about $296.73, with a high of $410 and a low of $144, implying roughly 110% upside from the recent price of $141.45. Whether Thursday's results justify that confidence will depend less on the headline revenue figure than on the guidance that comes with it.
