NBIS Stock Is the Search: Nebius Jumps More Than 11 Percent on CoreWeave's Beat - and Its Own $907 Million Test Lands Thursday
A rival's blowout quarter - $3.66 billion in sales, a $133 billion backlog, a raised forecast - pulled the whole neocloud group up overnight, and put Nebius, the No. 6 search in America at midday, one day from reporting numbers analysts expect to show revenue up 521 percent.
The search board found the stock market's story before the opening bell finished telling it. 'NBIS stock' sat at No. 6 on the U.S. Google Trends board at midday Wednesday, after shares of Nebius Group surged more than 11 percent overnight - a move the company did not earn with its own numbers, because its own numbers do not arrive until Thursday morning. It earned the move by standing next to CoreWeave.
CoreWeave, the larger of the so-called neocloud companies that rent out AI computing capacity, reported third-quarter sales up 168 percent to $3.66 billion, beating expectations, with its contracted backlog rising to $133 billion. It raised its full-year 2026 forecasts for sales and adjusted operating income, and its management said demand through 2028 runs several times higher than the capacity expected to come online by then. CoreWeave stock rose nearly 17 percent overnight, IREN gained 8.5 percent, and Nebius rode the same lift - the report eased the sector-wide fear that the AI buildout's demand might not be durable.
That sets the bar for Thursday, and the bar is specific. Analysts expect Nebius's third-quarter revenue to rise 521 percent to $907.2 million, with an adjusted loss of $0.63 per share against $0.40 a year ago, according to Koyfin figures carried by Stocktwits. The company reports before the market opens Thursday. Behind the growth story sit the financing questions the sector cannot shake: Nebius took a $3.5 billion financing facility from Citi in October to fund data-center construction and GPU purchases, raised prices on selected Nvidia GPU instances by a reported 17 to 21 percent starting October 1, and holds a major long-term cloud contract from Meta signed in March. Its stock is up 60 percent year-to-date.
For Houston readers the angle is the infrastructure itself: the neocloud race is a race to build and power computing capacity, and Texas sits in the middle of that buildout's map. What Nebius says Thursday about expansion plans - whether they are on track, and what they cost - is the sector's next reading, and the search board says the country will be watching for it.
