Nebius Emerges As Neutral AI Cloud Alternative, Deepens Ties With Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft: Analyst

Nebius Group NBIS stock surged on Monday after Goldman Sachs analyst Alexander Duval initiated coverage with a Buy rating and announced a price target of $68.

Duval noted that Nebius is emerging as a key player in the fast-growing AI Neoclouds space — a niche segment within the broader GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) market. The analyst pointed out that this market allows AI startups, enterprises and hyperscalers to rent GPU infrastructure remotely via the cloud to run large-scale AI training and inference workloads.

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Unlike traditional bare-metal providers or general-purpose cloud platforms, Nebius offers a vertically integrated solution explicitly tailored for AI demands.

The company customizes its hardware racks to optimize power efficiency — up to 20% gains — while controlling its data center design and operations, Duval said. As per the analyst, this enables better performance, energy usage and customer pricing.

Beyond hardware, Nebius’ full-stack platform includes orchestration software, elastic server configurations and dedicated AI cloud services like MLOps, database management and scalable storage, he noted. Customers only pay for AI-specific services, which sets Nebius apart from hyperscalers, which offer a wide but generic suite of tools, Duval said.

The analyst noted that Nebius positions itself as a neutral and flexible alternative to cloud giants like Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGLGOOG Google Cloud or Amazon.com, Inc.’s AMZN Amazon Web Services. Unlike those hyperscalers, which may develop competing AI models, AI Neoclouds such as Nebius offer shorter contract terms, greater customer data control and zero conflict of interest. This makes Nebius particularly attractive to startups and enterprise clients wary of handing over sensitive models or datasets, as per the analyst.

He noted that the company also leverages its roots in Yandex — where it operated hyper-scale workloads across services like search, ride-hailing, food delivery and music — to demonstrate technical and operational expertise at scale. Its AI Studio platform also offers Inference-as-a-Service, helping customers deploy and manage LLMs in production without building custom infrastructure.

Duval noted that Nebius is well-positioned to scale financially. As of first-quarter 2025, it holds $1.4 billion in net cash and has raised an additional $1 billion in convertible debt to fund its global expansion. He said that with major buildouts underway in New Jersey and other international locations, the company’s flexible strategy (co-location, build-to-suit and greenfield deployment) enables rapid growth while optimizing capital utilization.

Nebius is already serving hyperscale AI labs — for example, CoreWeave Inc CRWV supports OpenAI and Microsoft Inc MSFT — and is poised to deepen relationships in this segment, Duval noted. Its ties with NVIDIA Corp NVDA, which faces reduced reliance on in-house chips from hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon, further strengthen its position as a trusted GPU infrastructure partner, per the analyst.

Nebius projects a revenue CAGR above 50% from 2025 to 2030, with margins expected to rise as the business scales. AI infrastructure is forecast to drive around 90% of total revenue by 2030, growing to $5.9 billion by then, Duval noted. Inference, which now accounts for about a third of AI server demand, is projected to reach two-thirds by 2027, boosting utilization of depreciated GPUs and improving profitability, as per the analyst.

He noted that in addition to scaling inference and training workloads, Nebius sees upside from multimodal AI (e.g., voice, video), sovereign AI projects like Stargate and InvestAI, and broader enterprise adoption. All these trends underscore the demand for flexible, AI-native infrastructure and position Nebius to be a long-term winner in the GPUaaS market, as per the analyst.

Duval projected fiscal 2025 sales of $632.3 million and EPS loss of $(3.00).

NBIS Price Action: Nebius stock is up 16.37% at $51.55 at publication on Monday.

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