The artificial intelligence infrastructure market is heating up, and one company is sitting squarely in the eye of the storm: Nebius Group. The Amsterdam-based firm, a key player in the emerging “neocloud” space, has cemented its position as a major provider of AI computing power after securing multi-billion-dollar deals with tech giants Microsoft and Meta Platforms.
The news signals a significant shift in how the world’s largest companies are securing the massive compute capacity needed to fuel the generative AI revolution. Microsoft kicked things off with a massive commitment in September 2025, signing an agreement with Nebius valued at $17.4 billion over a five-year period, with the potential to reach $19.4 billion if demand increases. This was quickly followed up in November 2025 when Nebius announced a second major contract, a five-year deal with Meta Platforms worth approximately $3 billion.
These contracts are not just big numbers on a balance sheet; they are a direct response to the global AI capacity crunch. Even behemoths like Microsoft have struggled with shortages in high-performance AI cloud infrastructure due to insatiable demand and limited access to critical components, namely Nvidia’s top-tier Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). By turning to third-party “neocloud” providers like Nebius, these hyperscalers can bypass internal constraints and quickly secure the dedicated GPU infrastructure necessary to build and run their complex AI models.
For Nebius, the impact has been transformative. The company, which specializes in providing full-stack AI cloud services, is now sitting on a staggering revenue backlog exceeding $20 billion. This financial foundation has fueled a period of aggressive expansion. The company’s revenue for the third quarter of 2025 saw a massive 355% year-over-year jump, reaching $146.1 million.
The contracts provide the capital and confidence needed for a massive data center build-out. The Microsoft deal, for instance, will be supplied with dedicated capacity from a new Nebius facility in Vineland, New Jersey. Bolstered by these long-term agreements, Nebius has more than doubled its capacity targets, aiming for an active data center capacity of between 800 megawatts (MW) and 1 gigawatt (GW) by the end of 2026.
The deal with Meta, signed two months after the Microsoft contract, further underscored the intense market demand. Nebius indicated that the size of the Meta contract was actually limited by the amount of capacity the company had immediately available, a clear sign that its AI infrastructure is in high demand and nearing full utilization. While the company is incurring heavy capital expenditures and widening its quarterly loss as it invests to meet this booming demand, the securing of these marquee contracts with major players like Microsoft and Meta firmly positions Nebius as a critical enabler in the ongoing AI arms race.