AI & Nebius: A Brief, Sad Story

The machines are learning, of course. And the stock market, predictably, is having a fit. Artificial intelligence companies are being sold off. It’s a little like watching someone dismantle a perfectly good toaster, just in case it becomes sentient. So it goes.

They worry about disruption, these investors. As if everything isn’t a disruption. But the money still flows, doesn’t it? The Global X Artificial Intelligence and Technology ETF is up 109% over three years, despite the wobbles. A temporary stay of execution, you might say.

Nebius Group (NBIS 3.46%) is currently being beaten down, which, in the grand scheme of things, is neither good nor bad. Just…is. It seems like a reasonable time to consider buying some of their stock. Not because it’s a sure thing—there are no sure things—but because everything is, ultimately, a gamble.

Nebius: Renting Out the Future

Nebius is a “neocloud” company. A new kind of cloud. They rent out computing power—the brains of the machines—to anyone who can afford it. Nvidia, AMD, and others provide the hardware. It’s a simple business, really. Like selling shovels during a gold rush.

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Customers don’t need to buy the expensive hardware themselves. They just…borrow it. They run their artificial intelligence experiments, generate images, train models, all on Nebius’s dime. It’s efficient. Meta Platforms and Microsoft are big fans. They’ve signed contracts worth over $20 billion over the next five years. A sum that feels both enormous and utterly meaningless when you consider the size of the universe.

Nebius expects to make $550 million in revenue in 2025, up 368% from the previous year. Microsoft alone has promised them $17.4 to $19.4 billion. It’s a lot of money. Enough to make a person feel…slightly uneasy. Microsoft also has a revenue backlog of $625 billion. They’re busy. They may need more computing power. Nebius is waiting.

Growth, and the Inevitable Letdown

Nebius will announce its fourth-quarter results on February 12th. Analysts predict revenue will jump sixfold to almost $3.5 billion. It’s a growth rate that feels…unsustainable. The stock currently trades at 57 times sales. Expensive, yes. But in this strange new world, perhaps not unreasonable.

The demand for AI infrastructure is high. Nebius has a pipeline of contracts. Momentum seems likely to continue, at least for a while. So, it might be a good time to buy. Before the inevitable correction. Before the market decides that artificial intelligence is just another bubble.

Because bubbles, as we know, always burst. So it goes.

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2026-02-12 12:03