NVIDIA sinks $2bn into AI cloud provider Nebius

Chip giant NVIDIA has agreed a $2 billion partnership with AI cloud provider Nebius, a supplier to the life sciences industry and other sectors, focusing on the design and development of 'AI factories'.

Nebius's platform is used to accelerate life sciences research, including drug discovery, multi-omics, and healthtech projects, such as virtually modelling molecules at scale and screening hundreds of potential drugs against targets simultaneously.

Under the terms of the deal, NVIDIA – which is already a major partner to Netherlands-headquartered Nebius, supplying the tech that underpins its platform – will make a $2 billion purchase of more than 21 million ordinary shares in the Dutch company in the form of a private placement.

According to a Nebius financial filing, the proceeds will "support the investments needed to develop its full-stack AI cloud, as well as the development and construction of greenfield data centres."

The deal will allow Nebius to build up to 5 gigawatts (GW) of NVIDIA-based computing infrastructure by 2030, and comes shortly after it got a green light to build a 1.2GW facility in Missouri – set to be its largest US facility – which is part of a massive capital infrastructure spending plan for 2026 intended to meet rising demand for AI.

The worldwide AI in life sciences market, valued at $2.3 billion in 2023, is projected to reach around $11.8 billion by 2030, growing at a 27% a year, driven by its role in drug discovery, delivery of personalised medicine, and lab automation, according to a Markets and Markets report.

This transformation is driving significant investment and, consequently, substantial energy demand in GW for data centre infrastructure.

The two companies say they will collaborate on AI factory design and support, the creation of inference and agentic AI stacks for developers and enterprises, the deployment of AI infrastructure, and technology to monitor the health and performance of Nebius's AI 'fleet'.

"AI is at another inflection point – agentic AI, driving incredible compute demand and accelerating infrastructure buildout," said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of NVIDIA.

"Nebius is building an AI cloud designed for the agentic era, fully integrated from silicon to software and powered by NVIDIA's next-generation accelerated compute," he added. "Together, we are scaling the cloud to meet the surging global demand for intelligence."

Nebius' Nasdaq-listed shares rose more than 16% on the announcement, before falling back a couple of points after-hours, likely due to profit taking.

"Nebius has been built for AI since day one – not adapted from a general-purpose cloud, but designed for what developers actually need," said Arkady Volozh, CEO of Nebius.

"Now with NVIDIA, we are extending that throughout the stack – from gigawatt-scale AI factories to inference and software – as we build one of the first and largest clouds for all AI builders everywhere."