NEW YORK, May 21, 2026, 14:07 EDT
Nebius Group N.V. shares jumped 15.6% to $221.72 in Thursday afternoon trading, as investors seized on a Bloom Energy power deal that gives the AI infrastructure company another route around a growing constraint for the sector. The Nasdaq-listed stock touched $226.77 earlier in the session.
The move was about electricity, not just chips. Companies building artificial intelligence cloud capacity need graphics processing units, or GPUs, the chips used to train and run AI models, but they also need power fast enough to bring those systems online.
A filing showed Nebius Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary, entered a master fuel cell capacity agreement and related system orders with Bloom on May 14. Bloom will install, operate and maintain the systems, while Nebius buys the power capacity and associated electricity across three 10-year phases. The deal covers about 250 megawatts of guaranteed capacity and 328 megawatts of installed capacity, with monthly service fees that could total up to $2.6 billion over the term, subject to conditions.
Bloom’s systems will provide “behind-the-meter” electricity, meaning power generated on site for the customer rather than first routed through the public grid. Nebius said the first 328 MW project is planned to be operational this year and will replace previously planned combustion-based equipment at its first U.S. deployment. Andrey Korolenko, Nebius’s chief product and infrastructure officer, said power was “a key constraint,” while Bloom Chief Commercial Officer Aman Joshi said “AI workloads demand power infrastructure.” Nebius
Bloom shares rose 12.2%, making the announcement a two-stock trade. CoreWeave, another AI infrastructure name watched against Nebius, gained 6.1%, as investors continued to price the sector around access to power, financing and Nvidia-based computing capacity.
Nebius had already put a bigger business in front of investors. First-quarter revenue rose to $399.0 million from $50.9 million a year earlier, while revenue from its AI cloud business rose to $389.7 million from $41.4 million. Its remaining performance obligations — contracted revenue not yet booked — stood at $33.6 billion at March 31.
Reuters reported last week that Nebius raised its 2026 capital spending forecast to $20 billion-$25 billion from $16 billion-$20 billion, and counts Meta and Microsoft among its customers. Chief Executive Arkady Volozh said there were “several customers competing for every GPU,” a line that helps explain why investors keep rewarding capacity announcements even as spending rises. Reuters
Analysts are not all in the same place. Citigroup maintained a Buy rating with a $287 price target on May 15, while D.A. Davidson maintained Hold at $250 on May 18 and Morgan Stanley kept a Hold rating at $144 on May 14, according to Markets Insider’s analyst table.
But the downside case is clear enough. The Bloom agreement is still subject to conditions, and Nebius has warned that large power deployments can face technical and operational challenges; it may also need more capital to fund growth. If power delivery, customer ramps or financing slip, a stock trading on fast execution could lose that premium quickly.
For now, the market is treating power as the next scarce asset in AI. Nebius has turned that into a stock catalyst. The harder test comes when investors ask whether those megawatts can become revenue on schedule.
