Nebius shares soar 49% in premarket trading on multi-billion AI infrastructure deal with Microsoft (www.cnbc.com)

Dutch cloud infrastructure firm Nebius surged nearly 50% in premarket US trading following the announcement of a massive multi-year deal with Microsoft valued at $19.4 billion. The Amsterdam-based company, which spun out of Russian internet giant Yandex in 2023, will supply GPUs and cloud computing power critical for training and running AI workloads. The agreement guarantees $17.4 billion in revenue through 2031 for Nebius, with potential for Microsoft to purchase additional capacity. This deal underscores Microsoft's accelerating investment in AI infrastructure amid growing demand for large-scale model training and deployment environments. Nebius, backed by major investors including Nvidia and Accel, competes with firms like CoreWeave, whose shares also rose on the news. The partnership highlights the increasing importance of scalable GPU resources to support next-generation AI development and cloud services, signaling intensified competition and innovation in the AI hardware and infrastructure market.