May 13, 7:43 am
Nebius (NBIS) just posted one of the most explosive earnings reports in the AI infrastructure space. Revenue surged 684% year over year to $399 million, crushing Wall Street's consensus estimate of roughly $375 million. The company reported an EPS loss of just $0.23, absolutely demolishing the expected loss of $0.78. Adjusted EBITDA hit $129.5 million, compared with a loss in the same period last year.
The stock responded accordingly, surging to an all-time high above $213 in today's session. As of this writing, NBIS trades near $208, up around 16% on the day.
For AltIndex users, this story has been building for over a year. Our platform first identified Nebius as a strong buy back in March 2025, when the stock was trading around $37 per share with an AI Score of 80. The alternative data was clear: job postings were accelerating, employee business outlook was rising, and social media followings on X and YouTube were spiking. All signs that a company is scaling fast and capturing public attention before the stock price reflects it.
Nebius was not a one-time call. We flagged this stock repeatedly as the alternative data kept confirming the growth thesis. Here is how it played out.
If you had invested $10,000 in Nebius when our system first flagged it in March 2025 at ~$37, that position would be worth approximately $56,200 today. Even investors who entered at our January 2026 AI stock picks update at $94.50 are sitting on gains north of 120%.
The strength of alternative data is that it captures real-world momentum before it shows up in quarterly filings. Here is what AltIndex was tracking on Nebius months before the stock exploded.
Job postings were the first signal. When a company is aggressively hiring, especially in engineering and infrastructure roles, it tells you they are building something big. Nebius was ramping up hiring long before the Microsoft and Meta mega-deals were announced. You can track this data yourself on the NBIS job postings page.
Employee sentiment added conviction. Business outlook scores among Nebius employees were climbing, which historically correlates with companies entering hyper-growth phases. Happy, optimistic employees tend to work at companies with strong internal momentum. More detail is available on the NBIS employee rating page.
Web traffic and social media growth confirmed that external attention was building. Nebius was gaining followers on X and YouTube well before the stock became a headline name. Increasing web traffic to nebius.com indicated growing interest from potential customers, partners, and investors. When you see a company's digital footprint expanding across multiple channels simultaneously, it is usually a precursor to revenue acceleration. Check the latest data on the NBIS web traffic page.
Reddit mentions were the cherry on top. Our Reddit stock alert system detected a surge in Nebius discussions across investing subreddits in February 2025. Users were actively debating NVIDIA's involvement with Nebius, the data center strategy, and whether the stock was a buy at those levels. That kind of grassroots buzz, combined with strong fundamentals signals, is exactly the type of convergence our system is designed to catch. See the latest on the NBIS Reddit mentions page.
Let's dig into what Nebius just reported, because the numbers are staggering even by AI infrastructure standards.
Revenue hit $399 million, up 684% from $50.9 million in Q1 2025. The core AI cloud segment generated $389.7 million of that total, an 841% year-over-year increase. This is not incremental growth. This is a complete step-change in the business.
Annualized run-rate revenue reached $1.92 billion at quarter-end, up 674% year over year and 54% sequentially from $1.25 billion at the end of Q4 2025. Management reiterated full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion and an ARR target of $7 billion to $9 billion.
Margins are improving fast. A year ago, Nebius was spending 49 cents on every dollar of revenue on cost of goods alone. By Q1 2026, that had fallen to 26 cents. Total operating costs as a percentage of revenue collapsed from 336% to 132%. Adjusted EBITDA swung to a positive $129.5 million from a loss in the prior year. The company is not profitable on a GAAP basis yet (EBIT remains negative), but the trajectory is clear.
The contract pipeline is massive. Nebius disclosed a second agreement with Meta worth up to $27 billion over five years. That is on top of the $17 billion Microsoft deal signed in September 2025. NVIDIA invested $2 billion in Nebius in March 2026. Total pipeline generation in Q1 rose approximately 3.5x from the prior quarter.
Cash generation turned positive. Operating cash flow came in at $2.26 billion for the quarter, and net income hit $621 million. The company also announced a new AI factory campus in Pennsylvania, securing up to 1.2 GW of power. Contracted power now exceeds 3.5 GW, with owned capacity representing more than 75% of the total.
The Q1 beat is impressive, but the real question is whether Nebius can execute on the massive buildout ahead. Management has guided for $16 billion to $20 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, with roughly 60% already funded. They need to bring nine new data centers online, scale connected power to 800 MW to 1 GW by year-end, and begin delivering on the Meta and Microsoft contracts that ramp meaningfully in the second half of 2026 and into 2027.
The $643 million acquisition of Eigen AI is worth watching. Eigen specializes in chip performance optimization for inference workloads, and integrating that technology into Nebius's Token Factory platform could shift the company from pure infrastructure-as-a-service toward higher-margin platform-as-a-service revenue. That is the kind of strategic move that separates a commodity cloud provider from a defensible platform business.
Risks remain real. The heavy capex cycle means Nebius will continue burning cash. GAAP profitability is not expected in 2026 (management targets medium-term EBIT margins of 20% to 30%). Revenue is heavily weighted toward H2 2026, which introduces timing risk. And competition from CoreWeave, along with the hyperscalers themselves, is intensifying. But the demand side of the equation, contracts worth over $44 billion across Meta, Microsoft, and others, provides a level of revenue visibility that most growth companies can only dream of.
Nebius is one of the clearest examples of what alternative data can do for retail investors. While Wall Street was debating whether AI infrastructure spending would slow down, AltIndex's signals were painting a completely different picture. Rising job postings, growing headcount, improving employee sentiment, and surging social media interest all pointed to a company building something significant, long before the billion-dollar contracts were announced.
At $37, this stock carried real risk. It was a post-Yandex spinoff with limited trading history and an unclear path to profitability. But the data cut through the noise. And for investors who trusted the signals and did their own research, the returns have been extraordinary.
That is the edge alternative data provides. Not crystal-ball predictions. Not hype. Just real-world signals that move before stock prices do.
AltIndex tracks job postings, employee sentiment, web traffic, social media growth, and more for 3,000+ stocks. Our AI Score identified Nebius as a Strong Buy at $37. See what it is flagging today.
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