Nebius Group Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 12, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Q2 revenue surged 454% year over year to $582 million, while annualized run-rate revenue reached $3 billion. Adjusted EBITDA rose to $236 million, with a 41% group margin and a 50% margin for the Nebius AI business.
  • Positive Sentiment: Nebius closed four landmark AI cloud contracts averaging more than $1 billion each, with mid-term pricing of $20 million–$25 million per megawatt and upfront payments covering roughly 50%–60% of associated capital expenditures. Management said it could sell all planned 2027 capacity today but is reserving some for higher-priced short-term deals.
  • Positive Sentiment: Demand and pricing remained exceptionally strong: a capacity auction cleared at a record price, 15% above Nebius’ previous peak, while short-term three- to six-month training engagements are being negotiated at $40 million–$50 million or more per megawatt. The company also raised its year-end contracted-power target to 5 gigawatts and expects to deploy more than 1 gigawatt of new capacity annually from 2027.
  • Positive Sentiment: Nebius expanded its funding flexibility through more than $9 billion of expected customer prepayments, $8 billion in cash and equivalents at quarter-end, and a $775 million asset-backed debt facility priced at SOFR plus 250 basis points. Management said its roughly $40 billion contracted backlog provides a scalable base for additional asset-backed financing.
  • Negative Sentiment: Growth requires substantial funding, with Q2 capital expenditures of approximately $5.7 billion and full-year 2026 CapEx guidance of $20 billion–$25 billion. The company also issued 12.7 million shares through its ATM program for about $2.8 billion, creating potential shareholder dilution, while its 2026 revenue and margin guidance was reaffirmed rather than raised.
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Earnings Conference Call
Nebius Group Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

There are 8 speakers on the call.

Operator

Welcome to Nebius Group's Q2 2026 earnings conference call. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, you can click on the Ask a Question tab in the top right of the live stream player. Then just type in your question and click submit. You can submit questions at any time during the presentation, and the Nebius management team will try and answer them during the Q&A portion of the call. I will now hand over to Gili Naftalovich, Head of Investor Relations, to start the call.

Speaker 1

Hi everyone, and welcome to Nebius' second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining us on the call today, we have our CEO, Arkady, our CFO, Dado, and the broader Nebius management team. Before we get started, I'll quickly cover the Safe Harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking. Such statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially. Please refer to our Form 20-F for a list of our risk factors. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release.

Speaker 1

All earnings related documents are distributed and available to the public through our investor relations website, which can be found at nebius.com. I'd like to turn the call over to Arkady.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Gili, and welcome everyone to our call today. I would like to provide our investors with a better understanding of our business model. We had an excellent quarter. The demand for what we're building continues to be enormous, and we have the right business model to capture it. We build capacity ahead of contracts and use our multi-tenant cloud and our software stack to support our customers, AI natives, agentic AI leaders, Neolabs, and some of the most sophisticated enterprises. Our strategy is working. We choose when to sell, to whom we sell, and on what terms, and how we finance everything. This flexibility allows us to meet the needs of independent AI builders and to support an open, diverse, and competitive market. We address customer needs with three types of deals. Each has a different duration, pricing, and role in our business.

Speaker 2

First, for our core AI cloud business. We have mid-term contracts of 1-3 years with the world's most ambitious AI companies. This quarter alone, we closed four landmark deals with Reflection, Cohere, as well as with a scale U.S. Neolabs and a large U.S.-based quant trading firm. These deals were for an average of more than $1 billion each. They present a yield of $20 million-$25 million per megawatt, with upfront payments that cover 50%-60% of the associated CapEx. Most importantly, we could sell today our entire 2027 capacity on these terms if we wanted to. We are not doing this. We see that we can achieve higher value by retaining some capacity to serve shorter term and immediate client needs. Here we come to the second type of deal.

Speaker 2

This is shorter duration capacity, typically for up to 6 months, for customers with an immediate time-bounded need with high-value requirements. For this, they are ready to pay a significant premium. We are negotiating deals for $40 million-$50 million per megawatt range, and sometimes above, under this model. One of such deals has been signed just recently, by the way. Both deal terms I just described are all coming online later this year, so they will not have any material effect on our 2026 revenue guidance. However, they will definitely affect our 2027 revenue and beyond. The third deal type, as we noted many times in the past, is our long-term contracts with investment-grade customers. They serve an important purpose. They help us to finance our build-out faster and more efficiently.

Speaker 2

The secured debt facility we raised in July was on the back of one of these deals, and with $40 billion in contracted backlog, we will do more of this. We are constantly building, innovating, and developing our software stack, talking energetic offerings and services. Today, I would like to focus on different types of innovations from this quarter. We launched our first capacity auction. It was very successful and cleared at the highest price we have seen for the Blackwell generation of chips, 15% above the highest price we ever charged before. This gives us a strong signal on the value of this capacity in the market in real-time. This was an innovation of sorts on the go-to-market side. On the capacity side, we are also innovating in how we build. For example, our asset-light partnership model, which we introduced this quarter, provides an additional way for us to scale.

Speaker 2

This model addresses the two constraints of our industry, which is capital and capacity. Partners finance, build, and operate the facilities. Whereas Nebius brings the full stack platform and the demand. We provide value-added services that sit on top of our partner's infrastructure, which delivers us with high margin revenue and requires minimum balance sheet capital. This model has the potential to unlock new capacity for us in 2027 and beyond. We continue to build our future capacity pipeline through our own and co-located sites, and today raise our year-end contracted power target to 5 gigawatts. Our future capacity pipeline effectively makes Nebius one of just a few companies in the world able to build more than 1 gigawatt of new capacity a year, and we plan to do so in 2027.

Speaker 2

To close, everything we set out to do this quarter, we have done, and in most cases, we have done more. Landmark deals in our core market on better terms than we expected. Capacity rising to meet demand and a platform meeting the needs of the industry. We are not just reporting a strong quarter behind us, it is much more than that. We see the demand, we see the supply, we see deal terms for 2027 and beyond. Even our future capacity plans, including for 2027, we cannot be more excited about the future. On this optimistic note, let me hand it over to Dado.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Arkady. We enter the second half of the year with strong momentum as we successfully executed our strategy in the first half. We again delivered triple digit revenue and ARR growth in Q2, even before most of our 2026 capacity comes online in the second half of the year. This was coupled with a significant expansion in adjusted EBITDA margin while strengthening our funding position, which was supported by substantial customer prepayment terms and expanded sources of our capital. This start is strong and keeps us on track to achieve both our strategic and financial objectives for the year. I will touch on the progress we achieved in Q2, share details on our financial results, and conclude with our annual guidance, which we are reaffirming today. Please note that all comparisons are year-over-year, unless noted otherwise. Let us start with revenue and ARR.

Speaker 3

In Q2, we grew group revenue by 454% to $582 million, up 46% from last quarter. Our Nebius AI business grew even faster, increasing 514% from last year to $575 million and generating 98% of group revenue. Annualized run rate revenue reached $3 billion at the end of June, up 598% and increased 56% from $1.9 billion at the end of March. Revenue was driven by capacity added in Q1, higher utilization and high margin revenue from our new asset-light business model, Token Factory, and our recent acquisitions. Higher utilization was driven by improvements in our underlying infrastructure efficiency. Once again, we sold out of capacity because as fast as we bring capacity online, we can sell it. Turning to profitability. Group adjusted EBITDA was $236 million compared to a loss of $21 million a year ago, and $129.5 million last quarter.

Speaker 3

Group adjusted EBITDA margin was 41%, up from 32% in Q1. Our Nebius AI business generated adjusted EBITDA of $286 million at a margin of 50%. The delta between group and the Nebius AI business margin reflects our investments in Avride and TripleTen. Both are still early-stage companies, and we expect the Nebius AI business to continue to represent the significant majority of group adjusted EBITDA. The increase in profitability is a result of higher revenue and the early contribution of our asset-light model, as well as Token Factory and our recent acquisitions. Even as we continue to invest in growth, we see a clear path to capturing more margin, not just this year, but in 2027 and well beyond. We have visibility into pricing and expect capacity coming online from our own data center to begin improving margins in the second half of next year.

Speaker 3

Now, turning to our balance sheet. Prepayments from our customers reached an all-time high in the quarter. Roughly 70% of the deals we closed in Q2 included an up from prepayment. In total, customers' prepayments will bring in more than $9 billion of up from funding this year, directly reducing the capital we need from debt and equity. Operating cash flow was $2.3 billion in the quarter, and we ended the period with $8 billion in cash and cash equivalents. In Q2, we also tapped our at the market equity program. We issued 12.7 million Class A shares at a weighted average price of $224 per share, generating gross proceeds of approximately $2.8 billion. As of June 30, 12.3 million shares remained available under the program. We view the ATM as a flexible funding tool, and it remains an option in our arsenal rather than a commitment.

Speaker 3

In July, we announced our first asset-backed debt facility for $775 million. This facility is secured against contracted cash flows and priced at a modest spread over benchmark rates. Its rate today is equivalent to a mid-single-digit percentage. We have more than $40 billion of additional customer commitments at similar terms based on the strategic deals we have entered into with investment-grade companies. We will continue to diversify our funding sources while maintaining a balanced mix of debt and equity. We are progressing on additional asset-backed financing and continue to evaluate corporate-level debt and additional financing instruments. Turning next to CapEx. In Q2, capital expenditures were approximately $5.7 billion, driven primarily by purchases of GPUs, GPU-related hardware, and by our data center expansion. Our capital investments to date position us to achieve our capacity plans for the year. Let me turn to outlook.

Speaker 3

The solid progress we have achieved in the first half of the year bolsters our confidence in our outlook for 2026. As such, we are reaffirming our full year 2026 guidance across all metrics. We continue to expect annualized run rate revenue of $7 billion-$9 billion, group revenue of between $3 billion and $3.4 billion, group adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 40%, and capital expenditures of $20 billion-$25 billion. We remain confident in our ability to accelerate capacity deployment in the second half of the year and expect capacity deployed late in Q2 to begin contributing to revenue in Q3. As Arkady said, we are now building capacity for 2027 demand, supported by customer commitments already in place and providing near-term visibility into the revenue associated with this investment.

Speaker 3

Finally, we are actively pursuing opportunities to generate incremental high-margin revenue from our new models, our auction, our short-term capacity deals, as well as our asset-light business. In summary, our strong Q2 performance reflects a rigorous execution to scale the business profitability. We deliver solid revenue growth, we increase profitability, we opened a new capital-efficient path to capacity, and we expanded our funding alternatives. As we look ahead, we will continue to scale rapidly to capture the opportunity in front of us while remaining balanced, disciplined, and focused on delivering long-term value for our shareholders. With that, I will turn the call over to Gili for Q&A.

Operator

If you would like to ask a question, please click the Ask a Question tab in the top right of the live stream player. Then just type in your question and click Submit. I will now hand back to the Nebius management team for the Q&A session.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator, and thank you, Dado. Our first question comes in from Ryan Lantz from Morgan Stanley. With the Vineland, New Jersey data center site hearing adjourning without a vote, can we just get an update on the site? How is capacity tracking? With no vote taking place yet, how could this impact plans to ramp this site? Tom, can you help us answer that?

Speaker 4

Yeah, sure. Happy to. I will start by touching on the public hearing side of things. I guess maybe just one quick sort of general comment. Obviously, there is a broader set of issues and debate around data centers in the U.S. These are things that we track very closely, and we have generally found that we have an effective approach to moving into new regions, which is based on coming in early, being very open, transparent about what we are doing, engaging with the community, and actually answering the questions that come up. We find that this is an effective approach and the same approach that we have been applying in New Jersey around Vineland. Specifically around Vineland. Overall, we are on track with our delivery, and I will let Andrey speak in a bit more detail about that from the kind of the construction and build outside.

Speaker 4

With respect to the public hearing, what is happening right now? Data want to seek and final approval for the amendment to their originally approved site layout plan, and the amendment to the site layout plan was a result of the decision to switch from the project's power source to Bloom. I would say generally that the switch to Bloom, we think significantly enhances the project, including from a community perspective. It is an on-site power solution, delivering reliable power quietly and ultra-low emissions. I would also say these types of hearings, these are all part of the normal process, and we very much build them into our schedule with these steps in mind. With respects to this hearing on the layout plan.

Speaker 4

We're confident that the layout complies with all the applicable local, state, and federal laws and regulations. We're optimistic that once the public has been heard, this will move quickly to approval. We'll definitely keep you updated as we have more news. With that, maybe I can ask Andrey to add a couple of points just from the build outside.

Speaker 5

Yeah, sure, Tom. Hello, everyone.

Speaker 5

Well, we delivered all the tranches that we were required to deliver under the contract up to date. We have all the reasons to believe that we will continue to deliver the remaining tranches as required by the contract. Probably to add color, construction of the building itself finished earlier this summer, and engineering fit-out is progressing fairly well. Bloom fuel cells deployment should be fast. Overall, the switch to Bloom has been a variable and a good pivot for the project, we believe. With no significant impact expected on the project timeline. Tom?

Speaker 1

Okay. Thank you. Our next question is, we're getting a lot of questions actually on this from the portal. Mark, maybe you can help us talk through our landmark deal announcements. Can you characterize how those processes ran and why these customers chose Nebius?

Speaker 6

Certainly. Thank you for the question, and we are very excited about these wins. Closing billion-dollar deals in our core AI cloud business is an important milestone in our go-to-market journey. It confirms our fundamental belief that we can build a diversified customer base at scale. All four were competitive wins following a similar pattern. Our scale, performance, and reliability were the differentiators. Also, each customer sees us as a long-term partner they can grow with. In all cases, the customer already had an existing supplier, in some cases hyperscaler, and they were looking to partner and expand with next-generation capacity and a platform. As a matter of fact, let me tell you about one of these wins. They were introduced to us by a key strategic partner late in Q1. The customer was looking for a large-scale contiguous GB300 cluster.

Speaker 6

Also, flexibility for future expansion, as well as strong technical support and a long-term strategic partnership. When we closed with them in May, they cited our responsiveness, our transparency, the white glove support they received, and our ability to provide their current U.S. deployment needs as well as future sovereign expansion as key differentiators. We are now in discussions with them for more capacity, and they are exploring our inference solution, Token Factory. All of these wins were earned wins, not inbound walk-ins. We had multiple engagement cycles before closing. The customers validated our technology through hands-on POCs. One of them told us it was quite literally the best POC they have ever had. We are already in discussions with several of them on post-training and inference to support their revenue plans and growth, and with all of them on significant additional capacity and next-generation chips, including Vera Rubins.

Speaker 6

Yes, we have more deals just like them. Our pipeline generation stepped up again in Q2 and includes multiple opportunities over $1 billion, spanning AI natives, Neolabs, and enterprises.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Mark. The next question we have comes from Alex Duval, Goldman Sachs. Andrey, a large share of our deals we signed are tied to capacity arriving in late 2026 and through 2027. Given the sentiment around gigawatt-scale data center build-out, what gives you the confidence in our capacity ramp, and can you provide an update on our development timeline?

Speaker 5

Thank you, Gili. Well, we made very good progress this year with our contracted power, and we exceeding our end-of-the-year projections much earlier, for 2026. We will be raising, or we are raising actually the contracted power to 5 gigawatt now, by the end of 2026. Almost all of that power will come online over the next three, maybe 2, 3.5 years out of the contracted power, that number that we've mentioned. We are not stopping actually. This is being achieved by different region expansion and the mix of grid power and behind the meter power. We also working and secured to have the access to the hundreds of megawatts of the generation behind the meter power already as of today. We're also excited about our partnership with Bloom, which allows us to unlock and expedite a lot of our sites.

Speaker 5

I wanted to mention that the vast majority of our contracts is the cloud contracts, where we have the flexibility where, within the region, we can deliver it, reducing the dependency on any one location. Over-provisioning the size, over-provisioning the capacity is our highest priority for today and I believe will be the case for tomorrow as well. General approach is, we deploy as much capacity as we can, and we try to build in advance as much as we can as well.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Andrey. Arkady, we've had a number of questions come in on our strategy. The market is moving quickly. You mentioned prices are increasing, and you plan to expand capacity by more than 1 gigawatt per year. You also announced a lot of new initiatives this quarter. Help us make sense of how these fit into our broader long-term strategy.

Speaker 2

Yes, you're right. The market is evolving rapidly, actually, even more rapidly than everybody expected. The good thing about our business model and our platform as well is that they both allow us to evolve rapidly with the market. I will give you a couple of examples from just this quarter. First, as we all see, prices are changing fast, they're growing. Our model was built to build capacity in advance, but not to pre-sell it in advance. That is why we have this available capacity now that can allow us to allocate it to shorter term and much higher margin contracts. The second example would be, as I mentioned, we also launched our first auction, this quarter. This is the auction for the midterm contract. Why were we able to do so? Because again, we had free unallocated capacity, and we had our multi-tenant platform.

Speaker 2

We are just realizing the benefits from it. We have similar flexibility on the capacity front. Again, it is a strategic advantage of the platform we have. The fact that our platform is universal and able to work on any third-party capacity gives us an opportunity to grow even faster, and this is what our asset-light model is all about. We see there are multiple ways to monetize the universality of our full stack platform on both software and hardware part of it. The way we think about all of this is simple. This market is going to continue to move quickly and to grow quickly. We will be sure that our business model and platform will stay flexible to allow us to capitalize, to use all this growth.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Arkady. Our next question comes from Arsenije Matovic from Wolfe Research and was emphasized by many others from our portal. It relates to our new $775 million asset-backed financing. Debt markets have been volatile and all-in costs have generally moved higher. Are you still comfortable leaning on debt from here, or should we expect greater use of equity through the ATM or perhaps a convertible? Dado?

Speaker 3

Thank you, Arsenije. Our approach is not about making a call on the markets. Really, our approach is to match the right financing instrument with the right asset while remaining disciplined about three things: our cost of capital, minimizing shareholder dilution, and maintaining a strong and healthy balance sheet. Our first sources of capital remain customer prepayments and operating cash flow. We expect more than $9 billion of upfront customer prepayments in 2026. Clearly, this directly reduces the amount of external financing we need as we continue to scale. Beyond that, asset-backed financing is an important part of our strategy. The $775 million facility we completed in July, priced as SOFR plus 250 basis points, was backed by deployed DPUs infrastructure and contracted cash flows from an investment-grade customer.

Speaker 3

It demonstrated that even in a more volatile market, there is a strong demand to finance these contracted cash flows on attractive terms. Look, with more than $40 billion of committed backlog, we believe this is a highly scalable and repeatable financing model. Obviously, we expect to continue accessing this market as we deploy additional capacity. Also beyond asset-backed financing, we have significant flexibility. We currently have almost no corporate-level debt, so that represents an additional source of capital that we can evaluate as the business scales. Equity and equity-linked financing, such as the ATM or potentially convertibles, offer additional sources of funding. We evaluate those alongside all of our other funding options as we source of capital. We are actively considering further equity-linked and asset-backed financing options and continue to evaluate corporate-level debt and other financing alternatives.

Speaker 3

Overall, we remain very comfortable with our funding position. We do have multiple sources of capital available to us, and we will continue to optimize across them with a focus on cost of capital, limiting dilution and maintaining a disciplined balance sheet.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Dado. Our next question comes from Tyler Roddy with Citi. Mark, this one is for you. How do you think about the mix of allocating 2027 capacity between short-dated capacity versus multi-year deals? Is there a threshold of ACV per megawatt you are waiting for on the longer-dated deals to sign into those?

Speaker 6

Thank you, Tyler. Before I dive in, let me just make sure and clarify the deals with a little bit more nuance, the type of deals that we're doing with a little bit more nuance. Our medium term, or midterm contract durations are, for the most part, our AI cloud customer agreements, and that's our core of our business. That's where we're locking in strong unit economics with some of the world's most ambitious AI companies. Then separately, as you called out, we have the shorter term opportunities and durations, and these are premium deals. That includes, as an example, the auction that we described today, as well as the ability to capture sort of the shorter term scale contracts that we mentioned.

Speaker 6

In practice, what we strive to do is to optimize across customer type, price, payment structure, duration, and deal size, rather than strictly looking at a single variable or a compiled metric. Our current emphasis is taking care of existing customers, followed by new logos, and then terms. Terms in order of priority, including price, then upfront prepayment, then duration. So a bit wider than purely ACV per megawatt. We have also, at the same time, tactically shortened how far in advance we sell capacity. In effect, selling closer to deployment, which at the end of the day, has improved the pricing that we can derive while preserving our agility. We're deliberately allocating a portion of capacity for short-term and immediate needs because that is where we currently see the highest potential for combined realized value.

Speaker 6

To summarize, as we deploy capacity looking towards the latter half of this year and into next year, we will allocate across both medium and short-term deals, using this with our customer and terms lens that I mentioned earlier.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Mark. This next question comes from James Kisner at Water Tower. xAI has begun selling compute at premium prices. What does that say about market pricing for AI capacity, and are you seeing similar strength on new contracts and renewals? What does this mean for Nebius?

Speaker 2

I will take it. It's Arkady. Definitely we don't see any change here for Nebius, or our plans to change. We are playing basically on the same market as the three big hyperscale clouds. The whole AI cloud market is growing massively from hundreds of billions of USD per year to probably USD 1 trillion. Some people say more. There is no doubt that the main existing players will continue to grow with the market, right? There is also definitely an opening for the new entrants, for the independent players like us. Yes, we want to build a gigawatt capacity per year. Yes, there is not so many companies doing that. The numbers look great, big, but the market as a whole is growing by tens of gigawatts per year. It's like multiples of order larger.

Speaker 2

The hyperscalers are those who build a lot of this, but even them, they definitely cannot build all of it, and somebody needs to help them to build. That's not us. Somebody needs to build the rest of the market, and that will be us. This is our part. This is where we see the biggest opportunity for us. Coming back to the question, new players coming to the market don't change the market for us. They actually just, I think, validate the market.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Arkady. Our next question is from Rob Oliver from Baird. Is your strong positioning in open weight driving increase in friends among clients? Roman, I think this one's for you.

Speaker 7

Yeah. Thank you, Gili, and thank you for the question. First of all, we believe that customers, businesses, and even society benefit from competition and diversity. We were committed to an open AI ecosystem from the beginning of the company and providing open infrastructure without locking. So customers get flexibility, control over their data and models, freedom in how they deploy. At scale, the economics matter. Companies at the frontier of VI adoption are seeing the cost of token consumption and asking, "Can AI not only solve the task but do so with economics that allow it to scale?" Another important question is how to extract value from specialized knowledge and data held within enterprises and by their people and convert it into better performing AI systems. Everybody is saying that data is the mode, and maybe the only mode.

Speaker 7

All of this is driving companies towards more specialized models. Open source models are valuable, not simply because they are available, but because they can be tuned, trained, and eventually optimized for a particular use case of a particular customer, particular business. What has changed is that the quality of open models is improving rapidly. At the same time, the industry is moving toward the flexibility and control that we built from the start. Token Factory provides day zero support for frontier open models, and the velocity is just crazy. If you look just in the last four weeks, we got Nemotron 3 Ultra, GLM-5.2, Kimi K3, new DeepSeek-V4-Flash, MiniMax-M3. Today, new Nemotron 3.5 Lightning was released. But availability alone is not enough. We are building the capabilities to serve these models without compromising quality, cost, and performance. Let's take GLM-5.2 as an example.

Speaker 7

Some people called the moment when this model was released the DeepSeek Moment 2. Our implementation achieved 100% quality score and leading performance validated by independent benchmarking and Artificial Analysis. That position us in a great spot to grow and drive the demand to open source models that we see at the market now.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Roman. A follow-up from Rob. Can you provide any early color on the asset-light offering, early customer engagement, and how the economics look for you versus your core? Arkady, do you want to take this one?

Speaker 2

Yes. First of all, we are growing globally, but we are still a startup, and we should be very mindful about where we invest our own capital. We cannot go into all markets instantly and simultaneously. That is why we are very open to working with partners, and our platform allows us to do so. After we announced our asset-light model, we have had dozens of inquiries from potential partners who have significant capacity and enough capital, but do not know how to build and how to sell it. With GPU increasingly becoming an investable asset, look at the recent news, we expect more and more companies who will want to come to the market but will need our help to deliver this capacity to customers. By having the right tech platform and access to the market, we can help them.

Speaker 2

This is actually exactly what we can easily offer to them, and that is why this asset-light model. The model is still in very early stage, but we are very much encouraged by early signs and think that it has a great potential.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Arkady. Our next question is from Ryan Lantz from Morgan Stanley. Dado, you have said you could sell your entire 2027 capacity today. How should investors frame 2027 across capacity, pricing, and revenue? When will you formalize an outlook?

Speaker 3

Thank you, Ryan. This is probably one of the more interesting questions for investors on this call. You should expect the deals we closed in this quarter with more than $20 million per megawatt deals and less than 2-year payback period to start coming online from late Q4 and onwards. This can serve as the baseline for pricing early next year, as we could have sold out our planned capacity already today. However, we are choosing not to do so, reflecting our confidence with respect to future pricing dynamics. But also capacity, obviously, is major part of this equation, and we are going to deploy significantly more capacity in 2027 than what we have already done in 2026 and what we are going to do still in 2026.

Speaker 3

The dynamics we expect across both capacity and pricing make us extremely excited about 2027, although we will provide a formal guidance later this year. And don't forget that in addition, we expect our asset-light model, along with high-value services such as agentic and inference solutions, to contribute an increasing share of revenue while supporting even higher margins.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Dado. Our next question is from Brett Knobel at Cantor. Do we still expect to end the year with 800 megawatt to 1 gigawatt? Andrey, do you want to take that for us?

Speaker 5

Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

Speaker 5

We still expect to meet this guidance from 800 megawatts to 1 gigawatt of connected power this year. Also there was a part about the Vineland concluding in 2027. No, the Vineland is the part of 2026 capacity and connected power. What I wanted to say is that connected power represents the data centers, and there are a few steps coming from the data centers to the revenues. You have to commission the data center, build the network, build the clusters, deploy the platform, then onboarding the customers, and then the revenue generation starts. That takes a few months and depending also on the generation change of the GPUs, probably, there is a gap between the connected power and the revenues coming.

Speaker 5

In terms of our guidance from 800 to 1 gigawatt, yes, that is true about the connected, but I would think that about being active throughout the first half of 2027.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Andrey. We also have a question from BNP Paribas, from Stefan Slowinski, specifically around our $40 million per megawatt monetization in Q3. Is this reflective of initial pricing from selling Vera Rubin capacity? Andrey, do you want to talk about the ramp of Vera Rubin capacity?

Speaker 5

Yeah, absolutely. We have Vera Rubins in our labs for quite a while already. We already are getting the expected results with the Vera Rubins. First of all, I wanted to mention that step between the Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubins is somewhat easier from the technical perspective than a step from the previous generations to the Grace Blackwell. We expect to start deploying the Vera Rubins late this year or early next year and continue throughout the full next year.

Speaker 1

Yeah, to the first part of that question, we are getting a lot of questions from the portal on our new go-to-market motions. Mark, I think that will be a good topic for you. You piloted both a capacity auction and short-term scale training deals since quarter end. Walk us through the strategy behind these motions, what they told you about pricing, and are they still take or pay?

Speaker 6

Thank you, Keely. By now, I think we can all agree that the market is incredibly dynamic and moving rapidly. We are constantly looking for ways to discern signal and understanding in order to deliver a better and more complete understanding of our take or pay business. We launched these initiatives to first and foremost learn and validate while building our customer relationships in a disciplined way. What we described earlier as short-term scale training capacity deals are specifically customers that are looking for dedicated scale, in this case, GB300 clusters, for 3-6 month engagements at a premium. These customers have specific requirements, like time-boxed large-scale training runs ahead of a model release, or reinforcement learning post-training sprints. In the model world, we hear over and over again, weeks matter, and so does access to reliable performant AI compute.

Speaker 6

These customers are willing to pay for speed and certainty for a controlled span of time. On the other hand, the auction is all about clear price discovery. In today's environment, the price in the market can change literally as we move through a sales cycle. The challenge is to get a solid gauge on the fair value of our offering at any moment in time. The standard reference points, competitor pricing, analyst opinions, and even prediction markets are all over the place. In a market where we have several buyers for every GPU, we let the market tell us directly. The auction result was a price 15% higher than we have ever seen before, and 20% higher than our pipeline for Blackwells. Also, the winning bidder is thrilled with the experience.

Speaker 6

They called out specifically the combination of validated pricing and the certainty of access to the compute they need. Also, they told us they plan to participate in future rounds. So what you should take away is that these are both customer value confirming and independently lucrative. We are using a small portion of our overall capacity to drive price discovery and value-validating initiatives. These will help us to evaluate our capacity and the market as we move into 2027. They will both have a broad impact across our pricing, packaging strategy, deal negotiations, and they inherently have faster close to deployment cycles.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Mark. We are getting a lot of questions around the deployment of more than 1 gigawatt of new capacity starting in 2027. Dado, can you talk us through how we are planning on funding this CapEx at scale, and how do we prioritize our funding sources?

Speaker 3

Absolutely. What is important to understand is actually that we have multiple pools of capital available to fund our growth, and we are very comfortable with our ability to finance the capacity we plan to deploy in 2027 and actually beyond. Clearly, the first source is operating cash flow. We are already generating positive operating cash flow and expect this to increase meaningfully as the business scales. Then we have our customer prepayments. The terms we secured in Q2 cover approximately 50%-60% of associated CapEx. Going forward, one of our objective is to increase this coverage even farther. Third, our long-term contracts with investment-grade customers give us a very strong base to raise asset-backed financing on attractive terms. We currently have approximately $40 billion of committed backlog that we can borrow against, and we began utilizing this source of financing already in Q2.

Speaker 3

Beyond that, we have additional flexibility through corporate level debt and equity-liked financing, which we have not yet meaningfully tapped. We will continue to balance these sources in a disciplined way to maintain a strong balance sheet as we scale. We also see financing opportunities that are additional to those emerging around GPUs as an asset class. We have seen increasing reactivity and interest in financing GPUs as standalone assets, and we are strong believers in the potential of this market. Over time, this could provide us with another attractive source of funding. Overall, we are really very comfortable with our balance sheet today and confident in our ability to finance our growth in 2027 and beyond through this diversified funding strategy while maintaining financial discipline.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Dado. The next question is from one of our investors on the portal. Roma, what are we seeing in the market around token maxing, and is that having an impact on usage or adoption of Token Factory and Tavily?

Speaker 7

Yeah. Thank you for the question. First of all, I wanted to start with a reminder about our first inflection event that we held in June. Probably that was the first time when we publicly described our product strategy, where we built layer by layer the AI cloud to meet developers where they need us from scaled bare metal infrastructure to the agentic layers. The obvious trend is that AI systems are moving into the production. Coding is the most visible example, but this is not limited to coding. We see long horizon agentic workflows in financial services such as use cases at Revolut and Mastercard, e-commerce applications improving the customer experience and process in Shopify and many more. For example, Sword Health in healthcare or Higg Health in marketing automation, and other verticals. We also, as always, customer zero for ourselves.

Speaker 7

Iho, our own infrastructure agent, shipped at the last cloud release, runs an open source model served by Token Factory. The challenge that we see for the customers is scaling complex systems that combine multiple models, inference engines and tools. We help solve this with our suite of services, including Token Factory for reliable high-performance inference and post-training, and Tavily for grounding, particularly as companies move from closed ecosystems with built-in search towards more open ecosystems. Agent AI and Clarify teams are fully integrated into Token Factory effort and already shipping inside our roadmap. We see day zero support for the major open model launches, measurable performance optimization post-launch, and independent benchmarks, as I said earlier, continuing to rank us among the leading inference platforms. Q2 was also Tavily's first full quarter within Nebius.

Speaker 7

Its developer community grew to more than 2.5 million developers from 1 million in February. It launched keyless paper search built for autonomous agent consumption. It achieved the set of certification for enterprise deployments. We also see more customers post-train their own models, creating additional demand for inference and grounding throughout the development cycle, not only in production. Reinforcement learning rollouts, evaluation, synthetic data generations, and grounded training workflows all require significant inference capacity and reliable access to external information. These trends validate our strategy of building a vertically integrated platform that delivers attractive total cost of ownership and supports diversified workloads. We want to serve customers across the full AI life cycle, from training and post-training to inference and grounding. This is where our infrastructure and software come together as a strong offering, and we are only getting started.

Speaker 7

New workloads are bringing new requirements to the physical infrastructure as well. Again, we can address them as we build the full stack. Not only bringing new generations of GPUs that Andrey mentioned, agentic orchestration, tool calling, and data preparations are CPU heavy. We are aiding Arm and CPU deployments alongside the GPU fleet.

Speaker 1

Thank you. That concludes our earnings call for today.

Operator

This concludes today's call. Thank you everyone for joining. You may now disconnect.

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