Chipmaker Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) remains the poster child of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, and even from its lofty perch as the world’s largest company, it has gained around 20% so far in 2026. However, another AI stock has delivered far stronger returns: Shares of Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS), a fast-growing data center infrastructure player, have surged by almost 143% over the same period.
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Nvidia also appears confident about Nebius’ growth prospects. In March 2026, it announced a strategic partnership and agreed to invest $2 billion in Nebius for an approximately 8.3% ownership stake in the company. Under this partnership, Nvidia will provide the AI processors that will allow Nebius to deploy more than 5 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2030.
Robust financials
Nebius is focused on building data center infrastructure that’s optimized for AI training, inference (running AI models in real time), and emerging agentic AI workloads (in which AI systems autonomously perform multistep tasks).
The company’s most recent financial report highlights its business momentum. In the first quarter, revenues surged 684% year over year to $399 million. Nebius’ AI business performed even better, with revenue growing by 841% year over year to $390 million, accounting for 98% of total sales. The AI business exited the first quarter with annualized run rate revenue (an annualized projection based on its latest quarterly revenue) of $1.9 billion, up by more than 50% sequentially. Management now expects revenues of between $3 billion and $3.4 billion and an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) margin of nearly 40% in 2026.
Strong customer base
Nebius sold out its available data center capacity in the first quarter, with demand continuing to exceed supply. That imbalance is giving the company significant pricing power.
Nebius’ growing customer base is another major strength. Meta Platforms and Microsoft are major clients. The company’s recently expanded deal with Meta Platforms is valued at $27 billion over five years and could become even more valuable if demand for AI processing capacity remains strong. The company’s AI infrastructure deal with Microsoft is worth $17.4 billion over five years. Nebius also remains on schedule with its Microsoft-related capacity commitments. Management notes that both deals could give the company access to billions of dollars in financing at attractive rates to expand its cloud infrastructure.
