New York, June 18, 2026, 08:09 (EDT)
- Nebius traded at $292.79 in premarket, up 4.23%. It closed Wednesday at $280.91.
- The stock will join the Nasdaq-100 at the open on June 22, with CoreWeave, Astera Labs, Rocket Lab, and Teradyne also set to be added.
- The key question now is if index buying and AI demand are enough to counter worries about capital spending, customer concentration, and valuation.
Nebius Group shares jumped in premarket trading Thursday, pushing higher ahead of the company’s move into the Nasdaq-100 set for next week. The stock traded at $292.79 as of 08:07 a.m. ET, up 4.23% before the regular session. Nebius had ended Wednesday up 5.96% at $280.91.
Index inclusion can bring buying from funds that have to follow the benchmark. Nasdaq said Nebius will join before the open on Monday, June 22. The Nasdaq-100 covers 100 large non-financial companies listed on Nasdaq. Over 200 products track the index, totaling more than $800 billion in assets.
Nasdaq’s market hours are 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET for the regular session, with premarket from 4 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. It’s closed Friday, June 19, for Juneteenth. That means Thursday is the final full day to trade before the index change kicks in.
Nebius stuck out again after putting out a new company update. The company said June 16 it closed the purchase of Eigen AI, which works on inference and model optimization. Inference refers to running an AI model post-training. The deal was revealed May 1 and wrapped up June 10 once regulators signed off and other conditions were met.
Nebius isn’t just selling data-center space. Eigen puts a software and efficiency stack on top, as customers push to get more out of limited high-end chips. Right now, investors want to know which AI infrastructure names will keep strong margins when build rates level off.
CoreWeave, another neocloud operator selling AI computing rental, joins the Nasdaq-100 as well. Reuters calls both Nebius and CoreWeave specialists mainly working with tech customers. Both want to get bigger and challenge the bigger cloud names.
GPU demand is key for the growth story. Nebius logged first-quarter revenue of $399 million, almost eight times higher than the year before, and now sees 2026 capital spending on gear and data centers at $20 billion to $25 billion. “We typically see several customers competing for every GPU we bring online,” CEO Arkady Volozh told Reuters. Reuters
Large contracts are also key. In March, Nebius signed a deal to provide Meta Platforms with $12 billion of AI computing capacity by 2027. If Nebius doesn’t sell that planned capacity to other customers, Meta could add $15 billion over the next five years. That agreement came after Nebius struck a supply deal with Microsoft and after Nvidia put $2 billion into Nebius. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called it an AI cloud “designed for the agentic era.” Reuters
Analysts are positive on the story, but there are some reservations. BofA Securities analyst Tal Liani called AI infrastructure a “huge opportunity” for Nebius, per TipRanks, but MarketScreener data had 16 analysts averaging a $244.07 price target. That’s under where shares finished Wednesday. The gap signals some optimism is already baked in. TipRanks
The risk side of the story isn’t minor. Heavy capex can hit margins, Reuters said, and Nebius relies on big customers and third-party funding. Tom Blackwell, Nebius CCO, called these deals an “efficient source of capital” if structured right, but said execution, power supply, and customer demand all have to line up. Reuters
Nasdaq 100 futures rose 1.49% at 7:06 a.m. ET, according to Reuters, with U.S. stock futures broadly higher. Thursday’s session brings “triple witching,” the quarterly expiry for stock and index derivatives that tends to push up volume and volatility. There’s more on the table than just Nebius noise. For Nebius, the question is how much of the recent move comes from index flows—and how much is genuine support for the AI cloud strategy. Monday will tell. Reuters
