• Nebius plans to leverage revenues from hyperscale leasing to grow its own cloud business
• Starting to receive customer payments up front up to 100%, helping to cover capex requirements

Executives at Netherlands-based Nebius said the company plans to use revenues generated from leasing data center capacity to hyperscale customers to finance its broader strategy of building a vertically integrated AI cloud platform.

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2026, CEO Arkady Volozh said large hyperscale contracts provide cash flow and financial flexibility that the company can use to expand its own multi-tenant cloud platform.

Those hyperscaler agreements, Volozh said, primarily involve customers purchasing basic “bare metal” infrastructure while running their own software stacks.

“Those are great contracts and great customers,” Volozh said. “But don’t get distracted. Our main business model is not there.”

Instead, the company intends to use revenue and financing advantages from those agreements to fund a capital-intensive buildout encompassing all of the layers where margin can be captured: land, power, data centers, racks and higher-level cloud services.

“We use their resources, cash, credit ratings and other things to build our own,” Volozh said, adding that the hyperscale outsourcing demand is likely temporary as major tech firms eventually construct their own capacity.

Ambitious scale

Nebius has a USD 3bn contract with Meta over five years and a USD 17.4bn contract with Microsoft, also over five years.

Volozh, a Russian national who left in the wake of the war on Ukraine, previously founded the Internet search firm Yandex. He said he was able to sell that company’s assets for some USD 2.5bn and use the proceeds to launch Nebius.

In his remarks, Volozh hinted at his ambitions for the company. In reference to the hyperscalers, he said Nebius, with its full-stack approach, is “trying to play not just vertically in the same league, not only through all the services, but also in scale.”

Nebius currently allocates roughly half of its computing capacity to those large customers while directing the rest toward its cloud platform serving AI developers and enterprises. Over time, Volozh said the internal cloud business is expected to represent a larger share of the company’s growth.

Infrastructure expansion

Nebius said it expects to operate between 800 MW and 1 GW of active data center capacity this year and has already secured pipeline capacity for roughly 2 GW, potentially expanding toward 3 GW.

This week, local officials in Independence, Missouri approved Nebius’ plans for a 1.2 GW data center there.

The company’s website also lists locations in New Jersey, Finland, UK, Iceland and France.

Executives also highlighted evolving commercial terms that help support the company’s heavy capital spending requirements.

Chief Revenue Officer Marc Boroditsky said the company has begun securing upfront payments from customers for future capacity, in some cases collecting the full contract value in advance.

Those payments help fund the deployment of new infrastructure while aligning Nebius more closely with long-term customer demand, he said.

Boroditsky added that roughly 60% of the company’s projected capital expenditure needs for the year are already supported by existing opportunities.

Nebius expects capital spending of between USD 16bn to USD 20bn this year, with roughly 80% of that investment directed toward GPUs and other computing hardware and about 20% toward data center construction.