The week kicked off with a blockbuster deal underscoring the insatiable appetite for AI computing power. Nebius Group, an Amsterdam-based cloud provider born from Russia’s Yandex, announced it will provide Microsoft with dedicated GPU infrastructure in a 5-year deal worth $17.4 billion reuters.com reuters.com. The contract – one of the largest AI cloud tie-ups to date – sent Nebius’s U.S.-listed shares rocketing nearly 47% in post-market trading reuters.com. Microsoft will get access to massive compute capacity from Nebius’s new data center in New Jersey to fuel services like OpenAI’s models on Azure reuters.com. “The economics of the deal are attractive in their own right,” Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said, “but significantly, [it] will help us accelerate the growth of our AI cloud business even further in 2026 and beyond” reuters.com. This mega-deal underscores how cloud giants are racing to lock in AI hardware amid a global GPU shortage – and it instantly turned Nebius into a major AI infrastructure player.
