NVIDIA "ally" Nebius "scores again" with an investment of £1.7 billion to deepen its AI infrastructure in the UK

According to Zhitong Finance APP, Dutch AI cloud infrastructure provider Nebius (NBIS.US) announced on Monday that it will invest approximately £1.7 billion to expand its capacity in the UK, adding three new NVIDIA (NVDA.US) infrastructure deployment sites and continuing to expand its London commercial and AI R&D center. Boosted by this news, Nebius's stock price rose about 1% at the beginning of trading on Monday, while NVIDIA also increased by about 2%.

This is Nebius's largest single expansion commitment in the European market since it split from Russian internet giant Yandex and went public in 2024. Previously, Nebius completed its first NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra infrastructure deployment in the UK in November 2025. The three new sites will deploy NVIDIA's latest generation of full-stack end-to-end AI factory platform technology, with a total power capacity expected to reach 65 megawatts upon full production by 2027.

Nebius pointed out that this expansion in the UK aligns with the government's "AI Opportunity Action Plan," which will increase local computing power, enabling UK businesses, research institutions, and public services to build and deploy AI applications on a large scale.

In addition, Nebius has signed a 22-megawatt capacity leasing agreement with UK data center operator Kao Data. Behind this series of actions is Nebius's strategic intention to rapidly seize the global AI computing infrastructure landscape with a heavy asset model.

Policy "Tailwind": Alignment with the UK's AI Opportunity Action Plan

Nebius's decision to increase its investment in the UK at this time is backed by clear policy alignment. In 2025, the UK government launched the "AI Opportunity Action Plan," comprehensively laying out plans from computing infrastructure and talent development to sovereign AI deployment. Over the past year, the UK has established five major AI growth areas in Oxfordshire, South Wales, North Wales, the Northeast, and Lanarkshire, leveraging a total investment of £68 billion.

Nebius's expansion plan is highly aligned with this, as the company clearly stated that this expansion will increase local computing capacity, enabling local businesses, research institutions, and public services to build and deploy AI applications on a large scale. UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan welcomed this, stating, "We are determined to make the UK the best place in the world to build and deploy AI," and emphasized that Nebius's investment will provide businesses with "the infrastructure needed to train, test, and operate advanced systems domestically."

Nebius's expansion is not merely about capacity output but is a strategic enhancement based on an existing commercial closed loop. London-based fintech giant Revolut has fully migrated its AI architecture to the Nebius platform, utilizing the Nebius Token Factory to drive a real-time financial crime intelligence agent system while handling chat orchestration for over a million customer service tickets each month.

Several companies supported by the UK's sovereign AI fund are also developing on the Nebius platform. Prima Mente, which is dedicated to tackling brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, runs its biological foundational model training and inference services on Nebius, with its founder stating, " Nebius's expansion in the UK means we can run more experiments and iterate faster."

For Nebius, the ability to convert capital expenditures into visible customer cases is reshaping the market's pricing logic for this emerging AI cloud vendor.

Growth "Hardcore": Revenue Surge and Profit Turnaround

Nebius's strategic expansion is backed by solid financial data. In the first quarter of 2026, the company delivered a remarkable report card: group revenue grew by 684% year-on-year to $399 million, with core Nebius AI business revenue reaching $390 million, an increase of 841% year-on-year; the group's adjusted EBITDA turned around from a net loss of $54 million in the same period last year to $130 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 32%. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached $1.9 billion, growing over 50% from the previous quarter's $1.25 billion.

In terms of customer structure, Nebius has successfully built a core customer base composed of global tech giants. In addition to a five-year strategic partnership with Meta worth $27 billion (including a $12 billion dedicated computing contract and a $15 billion flexible expansion option), Nebius also holds a five-year $17.4 billion computing power agreement with Microsoft. These long-term contracts provide stable cash prepayment support for its continuous capacity expansion—operating cash flow in the first quarter reached $2.3 billion, with cash and cash equivalents at the end of the quarter totaling $9.3 billion.

Meanwhile, NVIDIA's strategic endorsement provides Nebius with top-level technical support. In March 2026, NVIDIA made a strategic investment of $2 billion in Nebius in exchange for approximately 8.3% equity, and the two parties reached a technical cooperation agreement, granting Nebius priority access to NVIDIA's latest computing power platform. This closed-loop model of "NVIDIA investment → Nebius builds GPU facilities → capacity consumed through contracts with Microsoft and others" is forming the most aggressive capital operation paradigm in the current AI cloud infrastructure sector.

It is worth noting that in the global AI cloud player report released by SemiAnalysis at the end of 2025, Nebius, along with CoreWeave, Lambda, and Crusoe, has ranked among the leaders, surpassing certain segments of traditional cloud vendors. This emerging force, referred to as "Neocloud," is rapidly rising in the global AI computing power landscape through a "full-stack self-built + vertical integration" approach.

At the same time, Nebius is actively recruiting engineering and R&D talent in the UK to supplement its team based in Amsterdam. Currently, Revolut's anti-fraud model, Prima Mente's brain disease research, and Meta's AI training workloads are being accelerated through Nebius in the UK