Shares of Nebius (NBIS) rose more than 4% on Sept. 17 after a leaked pricing update reported that customers will soon pay much more for computing power. Valued at a market capitalization of $58.9 billion, Nebius is an artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure company.
NBIS stock has more than doubled over the past 12 months, rising 122%, while shares have also climbed an impressive 182% on a year-to-date (YTD) basis. Is Nebius a good stock to own right now despite its lofty valuation in September 2026? Let's take a closer look.
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www.barchart.com The Bull Case for Nebius Stock
Nebius has spent the past year building out data centers packed with Nvidia (NVDA) chips, renting out computing power to AI companies that need it to train and run their models. It is a capital-intensive business, and until recently, Wall Street was not entirely sold on whether Nebius could turn all of that spending into real profit.
The company's second-quarter letter to shareholders, released on Aug. 12, made a strong case that it can. Nebius posted Q2 revenue of $582.3 million, up 454% from a year earlier. The core Nebius AI cloud business grew even faster, with revenue up 514% year-over-year (YOY) to $574.9 million, with annualized run-rate revenue (ARR) reaching $3 billion.
Notably, the company said its AI cloud business delivered an adjusted EBITDA margin of 50% in Q2, signaling the business is becoming more efficient as it scales. Nebius also closed four landmark deals in the quarter worth more than $1 billion each in total contract value, including agreements with AI companies Reflection and Cohere.
Founder and CEO Arkady Volozh summed up the quarter in the letter, saying the company closed the largest AI cloud deal on its "strongest terms to date, at prices that represent a step-change in the economics of [the] business.”
Nebius Stock Surges on New Pricing News
According to Seeking Alpha, a customer communication making the rounds online reportedly shows that Nebius plans to raise prices on several on-demand GPU services starting Oct. 1. The changes reportedly affect pricing on Nvidia's H100, H200, B200, and B300 chips, some of the most sought-after processors for training AI models.
The price hikes are not limited to GPUs. AMD (AMD) EPYC Genoa CPU rates are also set to climb 25% to $0.015 per vCPU hour. Memory pricing tied to those same Genoa chips is expected to rise about 41% to $0.0045 per GiB hour.
For investors, higher compute service prices signal that demand for AI infrastructure remains extremely tight. When a company can raise prices without losing customers, it usually means supply cannot keep up with demand, which supports widening margins going forward.
Nebius told shareholders in August that 2026 base annual contract value (ACV) per megawatt was around $12 million, but new capacity deals signed in Q2 were already commanding more than $20 million per MW.
A New Partner Adds to the Bullish Case
On Sept. 8, Nebius and data analytics firm Palantir Technologies (PLTR) announced a strategic partnership. Under the deal, Palantir named Nebius as its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner. Once the two companies finish integrating their systems, eligible Palantir customers will be able to access Nebius compute and inference infrastructure directly inside Palantir's enterprise environment.
Basically, Palantir clients could soon train and run their own AI models on Nebius hardware while keeping tighter control over their data, a feature increasingly in demand among large enterprises and government agencies.
Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp said in the statement that Nebius' compute infrastructure, paired with Palantir's software, will support the level of control organizations are demanding over their own AI systems. Volozh echoed that sentiment, saying the partnership lets commercial clients “run their optimized open models on trusted infrastructure.”
The Palantir deal adds a new, high-profile customer channel on top of an already strong quarter of bookings for Nebius. Combined with the recent pricing news, it helps explain why investors are willing to pay up for NBIS stock right now.
None of this means that the stock's climb is risk-free. Nebius remains a company spending billions of dollars each quarter on GPUs and data centers, and its profitability still depends on customers actually using all that capacity at the new, higher prices. But for a stock defined by growth expectations, the recent news gave investors two fresh reasons to believe those expectations are becoming reality.
Overall, Nebius has a consensus “Moderate Buy” rating on Wall Street. Out of the 19 analysts covering NBIS stock, 11 analysts recommend a “Strong Buy” rating, seven recommend a “Hold” rating, and one has a “Strong Sell” rating. The average price target of $280.69 represents potential upside of about 18% from current levels.
www.barchart.com On the date of publication, Aditya Raghunath did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
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