Nebius Group Shares Extend Gains as $1 Billion AI Deal Builds on Thursday’s Historic Rally to New Highs

Shares of Nebius Group climbed 2.89% Friday morning, adding $5.45 to reach $193.88, extending a remarkable two-day rally that has seen the artificial intelligence infrastructure company’s stock swing dramatically as investors reassess both company-specific catalysts and broader sentiment toward the so-called neocloud sector.

Friday’s gains built on a new multiyear computing power agreement with Reflection AI, worth more than $1 billion through 2029, which had already lifted shares more than 4% in premarket trading, according to StocksToTrade. The Netherlands-based Nebius, a “neocloud” provider that sells access to graphics processing unit-based AI computing capacity, has increasingly positioned itself as a key infrastructure supplier to AI-native companies seeking computing power without building out their own data centers.

Thursday’s trading session, however, delivered by far the more dramatic move. Nebius shares surged as much as 31.64% at one point Thursday afternoon, according to TimothySykes.com, before settling with a gain that TipRanks separately clocked at 28.4%. The rally traced back to reporting from The Wall Street Journal that investment firm Citadel had acquired the bulk of hedge fund Situational Awareness’s public equity portfolio, according to TipRanks. That transaction eased fears of a disorderly liquidation of the fund’s heavily AI-weighted holdings, since Situational Awareness, founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, had disclosed a $2.6 billion stake in Nebius as of the first quarter of the year. The subsequent rally was consistent with a pattern of short sellers rushing to cover their positions as sentiment around the stock rapidly improved.

Nebius’s stock has also benefited from broader momentum across major technology companies’ AI infrastructure spending. Following blockbuster earnings from Microsoft and Meta Platforms, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the tension his company faces in deciding how much internal AI computing capacity to use versus sell externally, saying Meta is “getting a lot of offers for compute at a significant premium over what we paid for it,” according to AOL. Microsoft separately disclosed signing more than $130 billion in new data center leases and outlined plans to double its data center capacity within two years, developments that AOL reported have directly benefited Nebius given its business model of selling access to AI computing capacity.

Not every recent catalyst has worked in Nebius’s favor. Meta’s disclosed plans to sell excess AI computing capacity of its own had earlier triggered a 12% to 15% decline in neocloud stocks including Nebius and rival CoreWeave, according to TimothySykes.com, as traders repriced the competitive threat posed by hyperscale cloud providers potentially competing more directly with smaller, specialized AI infrastructure companies. Separately, a one-year moratorium on new hyperscale data center construction in New York state has introduced regulatory uncertainty, though analysts covering the stock have suggested the restriction could simply redirect infrastructure growth toward other, more accommodating states rather than meaningfully constraining Nebius’s overall expansion plans.

The scale of volatility in Nebius shares over recent weeks has been extraordinary even by the standards of high-momentum artificial intelligence stocks. According to StocksToTrade, the stock has whipped between the mid-$160s and the low-$220s over the course of just several trading sessions, with daily closes ranging from roughly $171 to $221. Robinhood data showed the stock trading between a daily high of $198.56 and a low of $155.00 during Thursday’s session alone, a range StocksToTrade and other trackers have attributed in part to heavy retail trading activity connected to the WallStreetBets community on Reddit.

Nebius has continued to draw institutional validation despite the volatility. Nvidia disclosed owning a 9.3% equity stake in Nebius, valued at roughly $5 billion, through a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission revealed publicly on July 20, a disclosure that had sent shares up nearly 19% in a single session when the news first emerged, according to Robinhood. Baird analysts initiated coverage of the stock with an outperform rating on July 22, according to Yahoo Finance compiled data, which also showed an average analyst price target of $258.13 and a range spanning from $120.00 to $410.00, alongside a consensus rating between “strong buy” and “buy.”

Nebius has called an Annual General Meeting for August 25 to approve its 2025 accounts and reshape aspects of its capital structure, according to a company announcement cited by TipRanks, a development that will give investors an additional formal opportunity to review the company’s financial position as its stock continues to attract outsized trading volume and volatility relative to its underlying business fundamentals.

Nebius’s stock has posted extraordinary gains over various time horizons even accounting for its sharp swings, with Yahoo Finance data showing total returns of 125.11% over a recent one-year period and gains as high as 1,218.61% over a longer measurement window, though the company’s premium valuation, with a price-to-earnings multiple of 55.36 according to Robinhood, and debt-heavy growth strategy remain factors some analysts continue to flag as risks even amid the stock’s dramatic recent rally.

With Thursday’s rally driven substantially by the resolution of hedge fund liquidation concerns rather than company-specific operational news, and Friday’s more modest gains tied directly to the new Reflection AI compute agreement, investors are likely to continue watching closely whether Nebius can sustain its current momentum as the broader neocloud sector works through a period of unusually elevated volatility tied to shifting sentiment around artificial intelligence infrastructure spending across the technology industry.