Nebius tests the neocloud playbook with $40 billion in planned spending

Résumé détaillé

Nebius plans to fund its $40 billion AI infrastructure expansion through customer prepayments and loans, even as delays at a Microsoft data center raise questions about its financing model.

In its third-quarter earnings call Thursday, the neocloud company Nebius laid out $40 billion in planned spending for 2027, far more than Wall Street had expected. It’s an ambitious plan, but it rests on a string of planned projects that are already starting to show cracks.

Nebius plans to fund the buildout by relying on customer pre-payments and loans backed by customer contracts — essentially using the future value of its data centers to finance their construction. But that can be a risky strategy if those projects get bogged down by delays or cancellations.

“Building at this scale is hard, and delays are part of our industry right now,” CEO Arkady Volozh said during Thursday’s earnings call. “We are not immune.”

The earnings announcement comes on the heels of reports that Microsoft is cooling on neocloud deals that aren’t delivering on time. That’s a problem for companies like Nebius, whose financing strategy is becoming more dependent on repayments. Because if it can’t get to capacity on time, it will keep piling on costs while revenues slip.

One of Nebius’s largest customers is Microsoft, which is paying for AI computing capacity at a Vineland, New Jersey data center that is now months behind schedule. Nebius’s contract with Microsoft is worth up to $19.4 billion, but it’s already letting deadlines slip. Only just over half of the Microsoft capacity is now planned for delivery by the end of the year, with the rest coming in Q2 2027.

The delay is because DataOne, the third party operator of the site, “decided to wind down the temporary generation faster than it was expected,” according to Andrey Korolenko, chief product and infrastructure officer, as the site switches over to Bloom Energy fuel cells.

Still, that transition wasn’t entirely by choice. In August, the investigative site Floodlight identified at least 45 natural gas generators in operation at the DataOne site, even though it had not received any permits for operating gas generators.

DataOne is also facing…

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