Nebius Group (NBIS -12.65%) has come a long way in a short time. The company was formed in 2024, emerging from the remnants of the Dutch holding company Yandex N.V., which was primarily a Russian internet company. But after Russia invaded Ukraine and Russian companies faced sanctions, Yandex shed its Russian assets and rebranded as Nebius, an artificial intelligence cloud services company.
The newly formed Nebius began trading on Nasdaq on Oct. 21, 2024, and has been one of the biggest winners in the market ever since. The stock is up 1,320% since Nebius began trading, by far outperforming the overall market as investors recognized the critical role that data centers and computing capacity will have on the growth of AI. Shares jumped nearly 30% in the last week and are challenging the $300 mark.
Now, Nebius is getting some more good news -- starting June 22, it will be a member of the Nasdaq-100 index, meaning the stock will be scooped up by many index funds, potentially pushing shares even higher.
Let’s take a closer look at Nebius and why it’s been so popular.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
About Nebius stock
Nebius appears to have the right business model at the perfect time. The company provides cloud computing and graphics processing unit (GPU) capacity for running and training AI workloads.
The company operated seven data centers in North America, Europe, and Israel by the end of 2025, and has plans to operate 16 by the end of this year.
It also has some key partnerships. In March, Nebius announced a $2 billion investment from Nvidia to scale more than 5 gigawatts of next-generation full-stack AI capacity using Nvidia’s computing platform.
Nebius also has a five-year AI infrastructure deal with Microsoft, valued at up to $19.4 billion, to supply dedicated GPU capacity and more than 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. And it has commitments from Meta Platforms for additional AI infrastructure capacity, potentially valued at up to $27 billion.
Earnings for the first quarter included revenue of $399 million, up 684% from a year ago, and net income from operations of $621.2 million, up from a loss of $104.3 million in the first quarter of 2025.
Nebius also completed its acquisition of Eigen AI on June 10. Eigen, an inference and model optimization company, is expected to help Nebius improve its token factory inference platform, providing customers with faster time to production and the ability to adopt new models more quickly.
Management says the company is on track to see $3 billion to $3.4 billion in revenue this year, and between $7 billion and $9 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The company had $9.3 billion in cash on hand at the end of the first quarter and raised $6.3 billion in the quarter through convertible notes and the Nvidia investment.
NASDAQ: NBIS
Key Data Points
“We continue to see unprecedented demand across the market,” CEO Arkady Volozh said. “Compute and cloud needs are vastly exceeding capacity as more industries embrace AI and companies move beyond experimentation to real-world applications. We are seeing this demand firsthand and are capturing it with our full-stack AI-native cloud.”
About the Nasdaq-100
The Nasdaq-100 tracks the 100 largest non-financial companies on the Nasdaq exchange, using a modified market-cap weighting system that caps the largest names to prevent the index from becoming overconcentrated. There are many exchange-traded funds that track the Nasdaq-100, including the Invesco QQQ Trust, or the Direxion Nasdaq-100 Equal Weighted Index ETF.
Nasdaq announced on June 11 that it was adding Nebius, Astera Labs, CoreWeave, Rocket Lab, and Teradyne to the index. The index will drop Charter Communications, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Insmed, Verisk Analytics, and Zscaler.
Nebius stock jumped nearly 10% on the announcement.
