Nebius (NBIS) Jumps on Strong Earnings. Our Growth Signals Flagged It in 2025.

By AltIndex Research · 11 min read · August 12, 7:55 am

At AltIndex, we have had a buy signal on NBIS since early 2025, when the stock traded near $36. It is up more than 500% since, and it jumped again today after a stellar Q2 that delivered 454% revenue growth, $236.2 million of adjusted EBITDA and $3.0 billion of annualized run-rate revenue. Our alternative data says the company is still growing.

Nebius is building AI data centers years ahead of the revenue that pays for them, which means the only question that has ever mattered for this stock is whether the buildout is actually happening. Earnings reports answer that question once a quarter, months after the fact. The alternative data answers it every week, and it has been answering it in Nebius's favor since early 2025.

What the Growth Signals Showed

We've had a buy signal on Nebius for the last 18 months, with the stock's AI Score consistently staying above 60. It sits at 79 today, near the top of our buy range.

Four strong signals have built that score, and they all have moved in the same direction. Job postings ran at a monthly average of roughly 20 a week through the first half of 2025 and now average 266.5, an all-time high in our data and an increase of 788% year over year. Headcount (according to LinkedIn) has gone from 514 in January 2025 to 1,491 today. The employee business outlook, meaning the share of employees on review sites who expect the business to improve, climbed from 62% in January 2025 to a peak of 93% this June. Web traffic to nebius.com set a record in July at 797,391 visits, up 66% year over year.

The sharpest move came in February, when active job postings jumped from a monthly average of 37.9 in January to 104.3, then to 164.8 in March. That step change landed a full month before Nebius publicly announced its first $12 billion capacity agreement with Meta on March 16, and our job posts alerts fired twice in the first ten days of March, at 73.8% and 77.4% above baseline, while the deal was still unannounced.

AltIndex Job Postings Data, monthly average, January 2025 to August 2026

On July 21 we published a breakdown of the listings themselves rather than just the count, and found that one in three was a physical infrastructure role: data center technicians in Newport, three named sites in Israel, electrical leads in Finland, technicians across Oklahoma, Kansas City, Missouri, Minnesota and New Jersey, and a program management team titled "New Data Center Launches." That article set a test for this earnings report, which was whether postings would hold above 200 into the print. They reached 266.5 a week in August, up 99.6% in a single month.

What Q2 Confirmed

Every one of those signals pointed at the same thing, which was a company that was growing and scaling faster than the market expected. And yesterday, we got that confirmed in the company's Q2 earnings report.

Revenue of $582.3 million was up 454% from $105.1 million a year ago, and adjusted EBITDA of $236.2 million reversed a $21.0 million loss, giving a margin of about 40%. The company also raised its end-of-2026 contracted power target to 5 gigawatts from more than 4, expects to deploy more than 1 gigawatt of capacity annually starting in 2027, and now holds more than $40 billion in customer commitments with more than $9 billion in prepayments expected this year. Customers are paying for compute well before it exists, which is why deferred revenue on the balance sheet sits at $5.98 billion.

Nebius still reported a loss of $190.4 million, or $0.68 per share, and the reason is simple enough: depreciation, interest and stock compensation on assets built for future revenue all hit the income statement today. Stripping those out, the adjusted loss narrowed 64% to $33.2 million. Management left full-year guidance of $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion in revenue and $7 billion to $9 billion of year-end ARR in place.

What's Next for the Stock

Headcount is the signal to follow from here, because job postings show what a company intends to do while employees show what it has managed to do. Nebius has added people every month of 2026, going from 811 LinkedIn-reported staff in January to 1,491 today, and the line has not flattened. If capacity keeps coming online on schedule, this chart keeps climbing, and if it stalls, this chart will show it before the next earnings report does.

AltIndex LinkedIn Employee Data, monthly average, January 2025 to August 2026

One signal has softened. The employee business outlook has come off its June peak of 93% and now sits at 86%, still well above the 78% reading of a year ago, but it is the first real pullback in a metric that had risen almost continuously for eighteen months. Doubling headcount in a year puts strain on a company, and this is where that strain would show up first.

The financial risk has not changed. Nebius spent $5.66 billion on property and equipment in a quarter that produced $582.3 million of revenue, non-current debt has grown to $8.5 billion from $4.1 billion at the end of December, and a large share of the backlog traces to a small number of very large buyers, a concentration pattern we wrote about across the hyperscalers in July. Analyst targets run from $175 to $286 against a consensus near $255, which is a wide spread for a company this size and a fair reflection of how much depends on execution.

The Bottom Line

Everything the market repriced today was visible months ago in data that never appears in a filing. Job postings quadrupled in February 2026, a month before the Meta agreement was public. Headcount climbed every month while the stock fell through July. Web traffic set a record in the same month Nebius was signing the contracts that produced this quarter's revenue.

Reported financials tell you what a company has already done, while hiring, headcount and employee sentiment tell you what it is doing right now. That's the power of alternative data, and at AltIndex we continue to strive to give our members the leading signals that help them make more informed investment decisions.

Sources: AltIndex job postings data, AltIndex LinkedIn employee data, AltIndex web traffic data, AltIndex employee business outlook data, AltIndex AI Score, Nebius Q2 2026 results release and financial statements (August 12, 2026), company announcements, Reuters. Data as of August 12, 2026. Stock prices are historical and for informational purposes only. This article does not constitute investment advice.

Disclosure: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. AltIndex aggregates publicly available alternative data signals. Past signal performance does not guarantee future results. Always do your own due diligence before making investment decisions.