Nvidia plows $2 billion into an AI cloud company — and the stock pops 10%

Nvidia $NVDA +1.16% will invest $2 billion in Nebius Group, an AI cloud firm, the companies announced Wednesday. Shares of Nebius rose 10% in pre-market trading on the news, while Nvidia stock was mostly flat.

The partnership covers AI factory design, inference infrastructure, fleet management, and early access to Nvidia’s next-generation hardware, including the Rubin platform, Vera CPUs, and BlueField storage systems, the companies said. The goal is to enable Nebius to deploy more than 5 gigawatts of capacity by the end of 2030.

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“AI is at another inflection point — agentic AI, driving incredible compute demand and accelerating infrastructure buildout,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement.

Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said in a statement that the company was “built for AI since day one.”

Wednesday’s deal builds on an earlier relationship between the two companies. Nvidia had invested in Nebius as part of a $700 million funding round the company closed in late 2024, and held approximately $33 million worth of Nebius shares as of December of that year, according to Bloomberg.

Nebius was previously the Dutch holding company for Russian internet giant Yandex. It was renamed in 2024 after selling Yandex’s Russian business to a group of investors for $5.2 billion, according to Bloomberg.

The Nebius deal is the latest in a series of large Nvidia investments in companies that deploy its chips. A week before Wednesday’s announcement, Nvidia invested $2 billion each in optical components makers Lumentum and Coherent, according to CNBC. In January, Nvidia made a similar $2 billion investment in CoreWeave, a Nebius competitor, according to Bloomberg. Nvidia also contributed $30 billion to OpenAI’s $110 billion funding round last month and has said it plans to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, according to CNBC.

The pattern of Nvidia financing companies that are also its customers has drawn scrutiny. Critics have described the AI investment ecosystem as increasingly circular, with a small number of companies financing one another’s infrastructure buildouts and pointing to those commitments as evidence of durable demand.

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