When Leopold Aschenbrenner buys, Wall Street now pays close attention. The former OpenAI researcher, whose essay Situational Awareness has become almost required reading in AI circles, has just acquired a 5.6% stake in Nebius through his fund of the same name, making him the company’s largest shareholder. For the Dutch company, this is more than a regulatory filing: it is a seal of approval from the circle of investors who view AI not as a software trend, but as an industrial infrastructure cycle.
That fits Nebius well. The company’s real story begins not with enthusiasm, but with a separation. In July 2024, the former Yandex completed the sale of its Russian businesses. What remained were USD 2.8 billion in cash, a large treasury stock position and, above all, a new strategic freedom. Yandex officially became Nebius, and in the autumn of 2024 the stock returned to Nasdaq. The company emerged as a new pure-play AI infrastructure provider. Today, the group describes itself as an “AI cloud company” and is building a stack that ranges from data centres, GPU clusters and cloud software to inference and agent platforms. While Avride in autonomous driving and TripleTen in edtech remain part of the portfolio, the cloud business clearly dominates: in the first quarter of 2026, approximately 98% of revenue came from the AI cloud segment.
The company intends to continue expanding this core business, not only through additional computing capacity but also through software. With Aether 3.5, Nebius is extending its cloud offering towards serverless AI and enterprise-grade capabilities. With Token Factory, the group aims to establish itself in industrial-scale inference. And through its recent moves involving Eigen AI and Clarifai, Nebius is strengthening precisely the layer where future margins and differentiation are likely to be determined: model optimisation, system orchestration and production-grade inference. This is an important step, because pure GPU capacity is likely to become increasingly commoditised as availability improves, whereas efficient inference and tightly integrated software are not.
The first-quarter results support this strategy. Revenue surged from USD 50.9 million to USD 399 million. Annualised Run-Rate Revenue (ARR), a forward-looking annualised revenue metric, climbed to USD 1.92 billion by the end of March. On an adjusted EBITDA basis, the company generated USD 129.5 million, while the core business achieved an impressive margin of 45%. The growth outlook also remains substantial: Nebius is targeting full-year revenue of USD 3.0–3.4 billion and ARR of USD 7–9 billion. The pipeline expanded by roughly 3.5 times quarter-on-quarter in the first quarter. Additional growth drivers include the long-term Meta agreement with a total potential value of up to USD 27 billion, the multi-year partnership with Microsoft, NVIDIA’s USD 2 billion commitment and the expansion of secured power and land capacity to more than 3.5 gigawatts. Leveraging this foundation of capacity and contractual commitments, Nebius aims to establish itself as a globally relevant AI cloud company. However, this is also where the risks lie. The model is highly capital intensive: in the first quarter alone, Nebius invested nearly USD 2.5 billion, while carrying USD 8.43 billion in convertible debt on its balance sheet. In addition, the company remains dependent on key suppliers and supply chains. And the stock is no longer cheap: the enterprise value stands at roughly USD 60 billion, equivalent to as much as 20 times projected 2026 revenue.
For this reason, investors do not necessarily need to play the Nebius story through a direct equity investment. The stock has already surpassed the consensus price target of USD 240.77 by a considerable margin. Those expecting a resilient but not explosive share-price performance may consider yield-enhancement products such as Barrier Reverse Convertibles (BRCs). These products are designed for sideways or moderately rising markets and pay predefined coupons. Leonteq has recently launched two new softcallable BRCs featuring exceptionally high coupon rates. The CHF-denominated product pays a quarterly coupon equivalent to 21% p.a., while the USD version offers 25% p.a. Consequently, the products target a double-digit percentage return in a scenario where the underlying share trades largely sideways. The downside buffers are equally noteworthy: in both products, the barrier is set at 49% of the initial level. A softcallable feature within the structure may result in the product being redeemed early - as soon as six months after issuance - rather than reaching its maximum maturity of 15 months.
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