Nebius Jumps 4% on Leaked GPU Price Hikes, Tight AI Supply

Nebius shares rose more than 4% on Sept. 17 after a leaked customer communication showed the company plans sharp price increases across its on-demand GPU and CPU services starting Oct. 1.

The pricing update, reported by Seeking Alpha, covers some of the most sought-after processors in AI: Nvidia's H100, H200, B200 and B300 chips. The hikes extend beyond GPUs. Rates for AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs will climb 25% to $0.015 per vCPU hour, while memory pricing tied to those Genoa chips is expected to rise roughly 41% to $0.0045 per GiB hour.

The market read the move as evidence that demand for AI infrastructure remains extremely tight. When a company can raise prices without losing customers, supply is not keeping up with demand — a dynamic that supports wider margins ahead.

Nebius, valued at a market capitalization of $58.9 billion, has spent the past year building data centers packed with Nvidia chips and renting that computing power to AI companies for training and running models. The business is capital-intensive, and Wall Street had not been fully convinced the spending would convert into profit. The company's second-quarter results made the strongest case yet that it can.

The Q2 numbers behind the rally

In a shareholder letter released Aug. 12, Nebius reported Q2 revenue of $582.3 million, up 454% from a year earlier. The core AI cloud business grew even faster, with revenue up 514% year-over-year to $574.9 million and annualized run-rate revenue reaching $3 billion.

The AI cloud unit delivered an adjusted EBITDA margin of 50% in the quarter, a signal the business is becoming more efficient as it scales. Nebius also closed four landmark deals in the quarter, each worth more than $1 billion in total contract value, including agreements with AI companies Reflection and Cohere.

Founder and CEO Arkady Volozh summed up the quarter in the letter, saying the company closed the largest AI cloud deal on its "strongest terms to date, at prices that represent a step-change in the economics of [the] business."

That pricing shift is visible in the contract data. Nebius told shareholders in August that 2026 base annual contract value per megawatt was around $12 million, but new capacity deals signed in Q2 were already commanding more than $20 million per MW.

A Palantir channel adds to the case

On Sept. 8, Nebius and data analytics firm Palantir Technologies announced a strategic partnership under which Palantir named Nebius its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner. Once the two companies finish integrating their systems, eligible Palantir customers will be able to access Nebius compute and inference infrastructure directly inside Palantir's enterprise environment — training and running their own AI models on Nebius hardware while keeping tighter control over their data.

That control is increasingly in demand among large enterprises and government agencies. Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp said in the statement that Nebius' compute infrastructure, paired with Palantir's software, will support the level of control organizations are demanding over their own AI systems. Volozh echoed the sentiment, saying the partnership lets commercial clients "run their optimized open models on trusted infrastructure."

The run-up and the risk

The stock has more than doubled over the past 12 months, rising 122%, and has climbed 182% year-to-date. The Palantir deal adds a high-profile customer channel on top of an already strong quarter of bookings, and together with the pricing news it explains why investors are willing to pay up for NBIS shares.

The climb is not risk-free. Nebius still spends billions of dollars each quarter on GPUs and data centers, and its profitability depends on customers actually using that capacity at the new, higher prices. But for a stock defined by growth expectations, the recent news gave investors two fresh reasons to believe those expectations are becoming reality.

Wall Street's consensus on NBIS stands at "Moderate Buy." Of 19 analysts covering the stock, 11 rate it a "Strong Buy," seven a "Hold" and one a "Strong Sell." The average price target of $280.69 implies roughly 18% upside from current levels — a bet that higher prices and the Palantir channel keep converting into revenue growth.