Nebius Group (NBIS) Stock Prediction: $320 Bull, $122 Bear

The Nebius Group (NBIS) stock prediction everyone argues about is an ARR number, and that is the wrong number. Nebius has guided to $7-9bn of annualised run-rate revenue by the end of 2026, and it has also guided to $20-25bn of capital expenditure against $3.0-3.4bn of group revenue this year. A company that spends roughly seven times its revenue on hardware and buildings is not a software company with a hardware habit. It is a project-finance structure wearing a Nasdaq listing, and the variable that decides the equity is the share of that capex funded by customers rather than shareholders. Management says prepayments on the deals it closed in Q2 cover 50-60% of the associated capex. Against the whole 2026 budget, the more than $9bn of prepayments it expects covers only 36-45%. The stock closed at $237.33 on 25 September 2026 (Nasdaq), up 183.5% year to date but 17.2% below its 18 June record close of $286.69. Our scenarios to 31 March 2027: $320 bull, $224 base, $122 bear.

That gap between 50-60% and 36-45% is the information gain here, and I have not seen it spelled out anywhere. The 50-60% figure is a deal-level statistic: it describes the four landmark contracts and the roughly 70% of Q2 deals that carried a prepayment. The 36-45% figure is company-level arithmetic: $9bn divided by $25bn at the top of the capex guide, and by $20bn at the bottom. The difference, somewhere between $11bn and $16bn this year alone, has to come from convertible notes, asset-backed loans and at-the-market share sales. Having read every Nebius 6-K filed in 2026, I think the market prices Nebius on revenue velocity when the share price will be set by the cost of the funding mix. So the bear case below is not “AI spending slows”. It is a mechanism: every 10 percentage points of prepayment coverage lost on a $22.5bn budget is $2.25bn that must be raised at the prevailing share price.

What Is Actually Happening at Nebius, and Why the Capex Line Matters More Than ARR

Q2 2026 group revenue was $582.3m, up 454% year on year. The Nebius AI cloud segment contributed $574.9m, and ARR, which the company defines as the last month’s AI cloud revenue multiplied by 12, hit $3.0bn. AI cloud adjusted EBITDA was $285.7m, a 49.7% margin. On those figures alone, this looks like a very fast software company.

The cash-flow statement tells a different story. Purchases of property and equipment were $5,657.4m in Q2 and $8,130.3m for the first half, according to the Q2 results release. In the quarter, Nebius spent about $9.70 on hardware and buildings for every $1 of revenue it recognised. The full-year guide of $20-25bn means second-half capex of roughly $11.8-16.8bn once the ~$8.2bn already spent (about $2.5bn in Q1 and $5.7bn in Q2) is subtracted.

The closer analogy is a shipowner ordering hulls against charter contracts. The shipowner signs a multi-year charter with a creditworthy counterparty, uses that charter to raise secured debt against the vessel, and asks the charterer for a deposit. The equity holder earns the spread between the charter rate and the cost of the money used to build the hull. Nebius runs the same model with GPUs instead of ships. The July $775m secured facility at SOFR plus 2.50% was, in the company’s words, “backed by deployed GPU infrastructure and contracted cash flows from an agreement with an investment-grade customer”. FinanceFeeds has made the same point about CoreWeave’s fleet rate per megawatt: in this sector, the unit of account is dollars per megawatt, not dollars per seat.

Prepayments matter because they are the charter deposit. Deferred revenue on the Nebius balance sheet rose from $1,577.5m at 31 December 2025 to $5,975.2m at 30 June 2026 ($979.4m current plus $4,995.8m non-current). That is a net increase of about $4.4bn in six months, and it matches the $4,395.0m deferred-revenue line in the H1 cash-flow statement. On that net measure, Nebius has booked roughly half of its “more than $9bn” prepayment promise with half the year gone. Gross cash received is somewhat higher, since recognised revenue is netted out. Customers are financing a large share of the build, but nowhere near all of it.

The capex guide also got bigger in May. At the Q1 call, CFO Dado Alonso said more than 90% of the original range “is already secured by cash and contractual commitments” and that “the incremental capacity reflected in our raised $20 billion to $25 billion guidance will be funded through additional financing,” per the Q1 2026 call transcript. The prior range was $16-20bn. Chief Operating Officer Andrey Korolenko was asked whether component inflation drove the increase. He tied it to 2027 capacity instead: “the high number reflects confidence in our contracted demand pipeline and our ability to secure the infrastructure that we were against it. It’s not the cost pressure.”

How Nebius, Its Customers and Its Financiers Are Responding

Nebius’s answer to the funding question is its contract mix. The Q2 letter describes three deal types. Short-term contracts, typically three to six months, are “priced at a significant premium”. Mid-term contracts of one to three years are the core business. Long-term contracts with investment-grade customers are used mainly to raise debt. The four landmark Q2 deals averaged more than $1bn of total contract value each, at annual contract value of $20-25m per megawatt. Named customers include Reflection and Cohere.

Pricing is the lever: older-generation GPUs repriced “more than 30%” higher than in Q1. The first capacity auction, per Arkady Volozh on the Q2 call, cleared “15% above the highest price we ever charged before”. Management sees “a price opportunity in the $40-50 million per MW range” for short-term deals. At retail level, FinanceFeeds reported on 25 September that Nebius raised Token Factory inference prices by an average 18.3% from 1 October, with B300 capacity going from $8.10 to $9.70 an hour. Nebius has not confirmed it in a release or filing, so treat it as reported, not disclosed.

Nebius raised $6.3bn in Q1, $4.3bn in convertible notes plus a $2bn equity investment from NVIDIA, according to the Q1 shareholder letter. It then sold 12.7m treasury shares through its at-the-market programme at a weighted $223.6, raising about $2.8bn gross, with 12.3m shares still available at 30 June. In August it priced an upsized convertible offering: $3.0bn of 0.50% notes due 2030 and $2.0bn of 4.50% notes due 2034. Once the initial purchasers’ options were exercised, that became $5.75bn at closing. At the same time, Nebius exchanged $800m of older 2029 and 2031 notes for about 15.8m new Class A shares.

On 8 September, Palantir named Nebius its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner, and NBIS rose from $226.39 to $243.88 across that announcement (Nasdaq closes, 4 and 8 September). NVIDIA’s position is the one to watch. Its portfolio of listed stakes includes a Nebius holding that its 13G put at 22,256,412 shares, or 9.3%, most of it through a pre-funded warrant it could not exercise or sell before 11 September. As of 28 September, EDGAR’s filing index for Nebius shows no NVIDIA 13G amendment since the 20 July original. Nothing has been disclosed; that is not proof nothing was sold, because 13G amendment deadlines lag.

Dado Alonso set out the priority order on the Q2 call: “Our first sources of capital remain customer prepayments and operating cash flow. We expect more than $9 billion of upfront customer prepayments in 2026. Clearly, this directly reduces the amount of external financing we need as we continue to scale.”

Market Impact and Data: Pricing the Funding Mix

The table below puts 2026 capital sources next to the capex guide. Inputs are from company filings; totals are my arithmetic.

2026 capital source	Amount	Cost to equity holders
Customer prepayments (guided)	>$9.0bn	None beyond service obligation
Cash at 31 Dec 2025	$3.7bn	Already owned
Q1 converts + NVIDIA equity	$6.3bn	Dilutive (equity) / contingent (converts)
ATM share sales to 30 Jun	$2.8bn	12.7m shares issued
July asset-backed facility	$0.775bn	SOFR + 2.50%
August converts (2030/2034)	$5.75bn	0.50% / 4.50% coupons, accreting to 110% / 125%
Capex guide	$20-25bn	Prepayments = 36-45% of it

First, 2026 is funded. External raises of about $15.6bn, plus $3.7bn of opening cash, plus $9bn-plus of prepayments, comfortably exceed $25bn before counting operating cash flow. Second, the pressure moves to 2027, when Nebius says it plans to deploy more than 1 GW a year. The company has not published a 2027 capex figure, and I will not invent one. The mechanism, though, scales linearly. On a $22.5bn budget, each 10 points of prepayment coverage is $2.25bn. At $237.33 that is about 9.5m new shares, or 3.1% of the roughly 308.7m share base derived below.

The share base: 271,855,218 shares outstanding at 30 June per the Q2 release, plus about 15.8m shares issued in the August note exchange, plus 21,065,936 shares under NVIDIA’s pre-funded warrant, gives about 308.7m. It excludes post-June ATM sales and convertible-note shares. At $237.33, that implies an equity value of about $73.3bn. The market is paying about 24.4 times current ARR ($3.0bn) and about 9.2 times the midpoint of year-end guidance ($8bn). Net debt at 30 June was small: $8,545.7m of debt against $8,042.1m of cash. The August converts added cash and debt in roughly equal measure, so the scenarios below treat equity value as ARR multiplied by a multiple.

Scenario (to 31 Mar 2027)	Arithmetic	Target	vs $237.33
Bull: prepayments hold at 50-60%+, the 18.3% price rise sticks, ARR at top of guide	$9.0bn ARR x 11 = $99.0bn / 308.7m shares	$320	+35%
Base: guide midpoint, multiple holds, remaining 12.3m ATM shares sold	$8.0bn x 9 = $72.0bn / 321.0m shares	$224	-6%
Bear: prepayment coverage falls 20 points, $4.5bn replaced with equity near the bear price	$7.0bn x 6 = $42.0bn / (308.7m + 36.9m) shares	$122	-49%

The multiples are my assumptions. The bull’s 11 times reflects a lower cost of capital if pricing power and prepayment coverage both rise. The base keeps today’s roughly 9 times. The bear’s 6 times, about two-thirds of today’s, reflects a business replacing customer money with shareholder money. Note that the $320 bull target sits just above the $313.46 conversion price of the 2030 notes, the price at which August’s bond buyers start to own equity upside. For comparison, FinanceFeeds’ CoreWeave (CRWV) stock prediction applies the same bull, base and bear framework to the largest listed neocloud.

Regulatory Landscape and Tension

Nebius Group N.V. is a Dutch company filing as a foreign private issuer, and that shapes what investors see and when. It reports on Form 6-K and Form 20-F rather than 10-Q and 10-K. Foreign private issuers are also outside the scope of Regulation FD. This is why the Token Factory price change can reach customers and social media before any filing. For a stock whose bull case is pricing power, the key operating variable arrives via customer emails and call transcripts.

Dutch law also shows up in the securities. The August indentures let Nebius settle conversions in cash, shares or a mix “at the Company’s election (subject to certain conditions related to Dutch tax laws)”, per the pricing announcement. That clause matters for the dilution arithmetic above. If share settlement is constrained, the cheap-looking 0.50% coupon becomes a cash obligation that accretes to 110% of principal by February 2030.

The physical build faces US local approvals. On the Q2 call, analysts asked about Nebius’s Vineland, New Jersey site after a public hearing adjourned without a vote. Chief Communications Officer Tom Blackwell answered: “Obviously, there’s a broader set of issues and debate around data centers in the U.S. These are things that we track very closely.” Each delayed site pushes revenue further behind capex; COO Andrey Korolenko acknowledged on the same call that “there is a gap between the connected power and the revenues coming.”

NVIDIA filed its 13G under Rule 13d-1(c), the passive-investor route, which carries lagged amendment deadlines, so silence two weeks after the 11 September unlock is not evidence either way. Markets are attacking the pricing opacity from outside: CME is preparing futures on the price of renting a GPU, an external check on the rates Nebius reports.

What Happens Next: Three Predictions

1. The Q3 letter will lead with the prepayment ratio, not ARR. Nebius has not yet announced its Q3 2026 results date. Its newsroom lists only the Q2 date notice as of 28 September, and aggregators disagree between 22 October and 10 November. Last year’s Q3 results came on 11 November 2025. Alonso has said the objective is to raise prepayment coverage “even further”. If the Q3 letter reports coverage above 60% on Q3 deals, the bull mechanism is working. If the figure disappears from the letter, read that as a warning.

2. More asset-backed debt, less ATM equity, before year-end. Management has cited about $40bn of customer commitments it can borrow against. The first facility priced at SOFR plus 2.50%. Replacing ATM equity sold near $223.6 with secured debt at that spread is the cheapest way to protect the base case. I expect at least one more secured facility announced by the Q4 report. The 12.3m ATM shares still available at 30 June are the swing factor between the $224 base and a higher print.

3. The stock will trade on neocloud read-across until February. Year-end ARR, which settles the $7-9bn guide, arrives with Q4 results in early 2027. Until then, NBIS will move on peers’ disclosures and on sector sentiment, as it did in the neocloud slowdown sell-off. Our earlier Nebius versus Micron price-target analysis covers that correlation in detail. Polymarket has no NBIS price market. Its only live Nebius contract, “Will Nebius Group be acquired before 2027?”, traded at 2.4% Yes on 28 September.

Arkady Volozh framed the quarter this way in the Q2 letter: “We closed our largest AI Cloud deals on our strongest terms to date, at prices that represent a step-change in the economics of our business.” The next two reports will show whether those terms change the economics for shareholders too.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Nebius (NBIS) stock prediction for 2027?

FinanceFeeds’ scenarios to 31 March 2027 are $320 bull, $224 base and $122 bear, against a $237.33 close on 25 September 2026. The bull case applies 11 times to $9bn of ARR. The base case applies 9 times to $8bn. The bear case applies 6 times to $7bn and adds 36.9m shares to replace lost prepayments.

Why does the customer prepayment ratio matter so much for Nebius stock?

Nebius guides to $20-25bn of 2026 capex against $3.0-3.4bn of revenue. Prepayments are the cheapest funding; the rest comes from converts, secured debt or share sales. On a $22.5bn budget, each 10 points of coverage is $2.25bn, about 3% dilution at today’s price.

Did NVIDIA sell its Nebius shares after the 11 September lock-up?

No sale has been disclosed. NVIDIA’s 20 July Schedule 13G reported 22,256,412 shares (9.3%), mostly via a pre-funded warrant it could not exercise or sell before 11 September 2026. As of 28 September, EDGAR shows no amendment. Passive-filer deadlines lag, so no filing does not confirm that NVIDIA still holds the shares.

When does Nebius report Q3 2026 earnings?

Nebius has not announced a date. As of 28 September its newsroom lists only the Q2 date notice, and third-party calendars disagree between 22 October and 10 November. Q3 2025 results were published on 11 November 2025, so treat any unconfirmed date as an estimate.

Is Nebius raising prices on its AI cloud?

At contract level, yes: the Q2 letter reports older-generation GPU pricing up more than 30% on Q1 and new deals at $20-25m of annual contract value per megawatt. A reported 18.3% Token Factory rise from 1 October has not been confirmed in a Nebius filing.

How much debt has Nebius raised in 2026?

Nebius raised $4.3bn of convertible notes in Q1, a $775m asset-backed facility in July and $5.75bn of 2030 and 2034 convertible notes that closed on 24 August, while swapping $800m of older notes for about 15.8m shares. On 30 June debt was $8.55bn against $8.04bn of cash.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Scenario targets are FinanceFeeds estimates built from the stated assumptions. Prices are Nasdaq closes to 25 September 2026.