Nebius’s $1.2 Billion Super-Campus Bet Faces a Bruising Reality Check

The city council of Independence, Oregon, gave Nebius the green light to build its most ambitious project yet: a 1.2-gigawatt AI campus. The scale is staggering — roughly double the capacity of many hyperscale data centers. The company is simultaneously pouring nearly £1.7 billion into UK facilities that should hit 65 megawatts by 2027, and a New Jersey site that will come online in a first phase next year. Microsoft has already booked capacity. Any doubt about demand for compute was presumably settled.

Yet Nebius shares have fallen roughly 25% from a 52-week peak of €261 hit in late June, closing Friday at €194. The culprit is far more unsettling than a routine profit-taking dip: unconfirmed reports that Meta Platforms, Nebius’s single largest customer, is building its own cloud infrastructure under the code name “Meta Compute.”

A $46 Billion Backlog — and an Alarming Concentration

Nebius carries a customer backlog of $46 billion. Of that, $27 billion comes from Meta alone. Another $17 billion is tied to Microsoft. That leaves just $2 billion from all other clients. If Meta begins to self-supply compute and reduces its reliance on Nebius, the entire growth narrative buckles.

The market’s reaction was swift: the stock shed more than 8% on the week, though it recovered slightly by Friday. The 50-day moving average sits at €190.42, a level the share price is only just clinging to. Should the selling intensify, the 100-day line at €144.92 could become the next floor.

Explosive Growth, Stretched Valuation

On the operational front, the bull case remains vivid. First-quarter 2026 revenue surged 684% year over year to $399 million. The adjusted EBITDA margin for the AI business hit 45%, and management targets roughly 40% for the full year. To match demand, Nebius raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast dramatically to between $20 billion and $25 billion — a number that executives insist reflects customer conviction, not cost overruns.

Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Nebius?

That kind of spending, however, leaves the company reliant on external financing. Analysts caution that a gap between cash on hand and investment needs could widen if pricing power erodes. With a price-to-earnings ratio above 96 — versus roughly 27 for the average software stock — there is zero room for error. A 30-day annualised volatility of over 105% underscores the hair-trigger nature of the trade.

The July Pivot

Nebius is not merely a provider of bare metal. It has built a proprietary cloud platform that integrates hardware and software, and acquired the start-up Eigen AI last year to improve efficiency. That technological layer is meant to differentiate the company from pure real-estate plays and to attract customers beyond the hyperscalers.

On July 8 and 9, the company will present new solutions at an industry summit, explicitly targeting non-hyperscale clients. If the offering convinces the market, the customer concentration risk could recede into the background. If it falls flat, or if Meta’s ambition becomes a concrete product, the story changes fundamentally.

For now, Nebius remains a high-stakes wager on execution: a $51 billion market-cap company that must turn a $46 billion backlog and billions in new capacity into sustainable profit — all while its biggest partner may be drawing up plans to go it alone.