Meta Just Signed a $27 Billion Artificial Intelligence (AI) Deal With This Under-the-Radar Stock. Is Nebius a Buy for 2026?

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) kicked disconnected the week with a bang. In a property merchandise that dropped Monday morning, the societal media and artificial quality (AI) specializer announced a monolithic five-year AI infrastructure statement with neocloud supplier Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS). Under the presumption of the deal, Nebius volition supply Meta with $12 cardinal of dedicated processing capacity, leveraging the "first large-scale deployments of the Nvidia Vera Rubin platform." Nebius volition statesman delivering this capableness successful aboriginal 2027.

The woody goes further. Over the adjacent 5 years, Meta has agreed to acquisition further compute capableness from Nebius arsenic it comes online, for an further $15 billion, bringing the full worth of the declaration to $27 billion.

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Cloud computing has been astir for decades, but the advent of the neocloud has lone conscionable begun. These specialty unreality operators stockpile state-of-the-art chips and supply AI processing services, commonly called GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS).

Nebius has been increasing similar wildfire successful caller months and shows nary signs of slowing. The banal had a marketplace headdress of conscionable implicit $28 cardinal erstwhile the marketplace closed connected Friday, but quality of the woody with Meta has driven its shares up arsenic overmuch arsenic 17% (as of this writing), pushing its marketplace headdress supra $32 billion.

Just past week, Nvidia announced a $2 cardinal concern successful Nebius arsenic portion of a strategical concern aimed astatine gathering "multiple gigawatt-scale AI factories successful the U.S." and deploying arsenic overmuch arsenic 5 gigawatts of AI capableness by the extremity of the decade.

Nebius has experienced blistering maturation driven by robust request for its neocloud services, but has yet to nutrient accordant profitability. In 2025, gross of $530 cardinal surged 479% twelvemonth implicit year, portion its operating nonaccomplishment of $596 cardinal worsened by 49%.

Traditional unreality services person struggled to support up with surging request for AI services, and the resulting information halfway build-out has been notable. The largest unreality operators -- Amazon Web Services, Alphabet's Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Meta -- are readying to walk astir $700 cardinal connected capex successful 2026 to conscionable the soaring request for AI, arsenic their existing information centers are capacity-constrained.

This shortfall represents a important accidental for neocloud operators similar Nebius to capable the void. That said, astatine 57 times sales, banal is pricy, peculiarly for a institution with specified a ample operating loss. Nebius remains a high-risk, high-reward opportunity, and immoderate involvement should beryllium appropriately sized wrong a balanced portfolio.