‘Time to Stock Up,’ Says Citi After Pulling the Trigger on Nebius Stock (NBIS)

Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS) stock has kicked off the week on a strong note after the neocloud provider landed a major agreement with Meta Platforms.

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Shares jumped about 15% after Nebius revealed a cloud computing deal with the social media giant that could be worth as much as $27 billion. Under the agreement, Nebius will deliver $12 billion in dedicated computing capacity for Meta across multiple sites, powered by Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform, with deployment expected to begin in early 2027. Meta has also committed to purchasing up to an additional $15 billion in available compute capacity over the following five years.

Investors evidently liked the deal, and the stock appears to have also gotten the thumbs up from Citi analyst Tyler Radke, who has initiated coverage of NBIS with a Buy rating and $169 price target. That figure points toward 12-month gains of 30%. (To watch Radke’s track record, click here)

“Nebius is emerging as a full‑stack AI cloud platform with deep infrastructure roots, early GPU access, and a capital‑efficient model that is scaling ahead of peers,” Radke explains.

Formed from the spin-off of Yandex’s non-Russian assets, Nebius brings together an experienced infrastructure engineering team, proprietary datacenter architectures, and a vertically integrated stack that covers compute, orchestration, inference, and agentic workflow services.

The company is scaling quickly, and Radke believes the ongoing capacity expansion will allow it to secure a meaningful share of the AI compute TAM (total addressable market). Citi estimates tracked AI workloads will increase from about 18GW in 2025 to roughly 110GW by 2030, representing approximately a 44% CAGR. By comparison, it forecasts that Nebius’s growth rate will be at a 93% CAGR, placing it among the fastest-growing AI cloud providers worldwide. This expansion is backed by a diversified contract base and significant hyperscaler prepayments, which help limit the need for outside financing.

Meanwhile, customer diligence points to “production-grade stability,” robust price performance, and early access to next-generation GPUs, particularly for regulated and latency-sensitive use cases. Standing in its stead here is its partnership with Nvidia, a relationship that has been strengthened by Nvidia’s $2 billion warrant investment.

Nebius also has a solid balance sheet and a “well‑defined funding strategy,” with more than 60% of its FY26 CapEx already secured. Its core AI cloud business has recently reached EBITDA profitability, and the company is targeting 20–30% medium-term EBIT margins. Additionally, the company holds about a 25% stake in ClickHouse (valued around $3.75 billion), a largely unrecognized, non-dilutive analytics database asset that could help fund its multi-GW expansion.

So, that’s the Citi view, but what does the rest of the Street make of NBIS’s prospects? Based on an additional 6 Buys and 1 Hold, the analyst consensus rates the stock a Strong Buy. The forecast calls for 12-month returns of ~25%, considering the average price target stands at $161.88. (See NBIS stock forecast)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analyst. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.

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