New York, January 16, 2026, 12:57 PM EST — Regular session underway.
- Shares of Nebius Group climbed roughly 3.9% by midday, following a volatile session.
- Morgan Stanley kicked off coverage with an equal-weight rating and set a $126 price target, sources say.
- Investors are digesting fresh funding updates from ClickHouse, where Nebius holds an equity stake.
Nebius Group N.V. shares climbed roughly 3.9% to $107.89 by midday Friday. The stock swung between $100.80 and $110.47 during the session, with about 9.8 million shares changing hands.
This move keeps the Nasdaq-listed AI infrastructure player in focus as traders chase momentum in “compute” stocks. The race for power, chips, and rapid expansion is the real story—and it shifts fast.
Fresh coverage plays a key role here. It can sharpen the debate over what investors are actually paying for now compared to what they’re being asked to finance going forward.
On Friday, ClickHouse, a database firm, announced a $15 billion valuation following its latest funding round. CEO Aaron Katz called the deal another wager on the AI surge. The company secured $400 million in a Series D round led by Dragoneer Investment Group and revealed plans to acquire Langfuse, an open-source tool for testing and monitoring large language model applications. 1
Morgan Stanley’s Josh Baer has kicked off coverage of Nebius with an equal-weight rating and set a $126 price target, Benzinga reported Thursday. The firm highlighted Nebius’s potential to ramp up capacity and scale quickly, saying it could “inflect margins and FCF meaningfully positive.” 2
Morgan Stanley flagged the heavy reliance on targets set well beyond the next few quarters. The bank called Nebius’s $7 billion to $9 billion annual recurring revenue goal for Q4 2026 “optimistic.” It also noted that depreciation and heavy capital expenditure could keep free cash flow in the red for some time. (Annual recurring revenue tracks subscription-style sales; free cash flow is what’s left after business expenses.) 3
Nebius has equity stakes in ClickHouse and several other companies, in addition to its main AI cloud platform. In a May 2025 statement tied to ClickHouse’s Series C funding, Nebius founder and CEO Arkady Volozh said, “We believe our non-core assets will provide us with billions of dollars to invest in our core AI infrastructure business.” 4
ClickHouse framed its latest funding round as a boost for product growth and its push into the “AI era.” “ClickHouse was built to deliver exceptional performance and cost efficiency for the most demanding data workloads,” Katz said in a blog post announcing the raise. 5
The broader market provided scant support. The Invesco QQQ Trust, tracking the Nasdaq 100, slipped roughly 0.1%, while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF inched up by a tiny margin.
That said, the stock’s wild intraday moves highlight the risks. Delays in data-center projects, hiccups in power hookups, or rising financing expenses could quickly shift the narrative from growth to balance-sheet troubles.
Investors are now looking for early signs of demand and deployment pace. Nebius plans a technical walkthrough webinar for its AI Cloud 3.1 launch on January 29. 6
