Key Points
Nebius plunged 16.8% to $128.64 on Thursday, even though third-quarter revenue jumped 571% to $980.8 million and beat the $907.5 million Wall Street expected.
The company now sees 2026 revenue at the low end of its $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion range, while 2026 capital spending rises to about $27 billion, up from $20 billion to $25 billion.
For 2027, Nebius guided to $12 billion to $13 billion of revenue against $40 billion to $45 billion of capital spending.
The report landed the same morning Nvidia said Jensen Huang had resigned as CEO. Nvidia fell 4.3% to $166.19, CoreWeave tumbled 6.9% and AMD jumped 5.9%.
At 4:01 p.m., the Nasdaq was down 0.4%, the S&P 500 down 0.3% and the Dow down 0.4%.
On Wednesday, the AI cloud trade got its confidence back.
On Thursday, it found out how fast that can disappear.
Nebius reported a quarter most companies would frame and hang on the wall. Revenue rose almost sevenfold, and adjusted EBITDA swung to $465.8 million from a $5.2 million loss a year earlier.
The stock plunged 16.8% anyway, closing at $128.64. That erased the 15.4% jump it had on Wednesday, when CoreWeave's results lifted the whole group.
The Quarter Was Fine. The Calendar Wasn't.
The problem wasn't demand. It was timing.
Nebius said some capacity at third-party data centers that was supposed to come online this year has slipped into the first half of 2027. That pushes revenue out of 2026, so the company now expects to finish the year at the low end of its $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion range. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had been looking for $3.37 billion.
The biggest delay is in Vineland, New Jersey, where Nebius is building capacity for Microsoft. Management said the site's operator, DataOne, wound down its temporary power generation faster than expected while Bloom Energy fuel cells were still ramping up. Nebius now expects to deliver more than half of the Microsoft capacity by year-end, with the rest in the second quarter of 2027.
"Delays are part of our industry right now. We are not immune," CEO Arkady Volozh said. He said none of the delayed capacity has been canceled.
Investors heard something else: even signed contracts can't get power fast enough.
The Spending Went the Other Way
While revenue moved later, the bills moved higher.
Nebius spent $7.3 billion on capital projects in the third quarter alone. It raised its 2026 capital spending forecast to about $27 billion, above both its prior range and the $23.85 billion FactSet consensus.
Then came the first look at 2027: $12 billion to $13 billion in revenue, which Nebius called "a conservative approach to the pace of our build-out," against $40 billion to $45 billion in capital spending. The FactSet estimate for 2027 spending had been $28.77 billion.
In other words, Nebius plans to spend more than three dollars on construction next year for every dollar of revenue it expects to bring in.
How Nebius Plans to Pay for It
Nebius said contracts signed in the third quarter were priced above $25 million per megawatt, up from $20 million to $25 million in the second quarter. Customer prepayments on those new deals covered more than 100% of the capital needed to bring the capacity online, up from 50% to 60% the quarter before.
The company expects $10 billion in committed customer prepayments in 2026 and $17 billion to $20 billion in 2027. Along with loans backed by contracts with investment-grade customers like Microsoft and Meta, it expects that to fund 75% to 85% of 2027 spending.
That's a cleaner story than the one CoreWeave told on Wednesday. We broke down CoreWeave's $709 million loss and why the stock jumped anyway. But a cleaner funding plan doesn't help much when the market is suddenly asking a bigger question.
Nvidia's CEO Is Gone
After a late Wednesday night meeting, Nvidia's board accepted Jensen Huang's resignation as president, CEO and director, effective immediately. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress is now interim CEO and will keep her CFO role. Longtime director Harvey C. Jones became the board's first-ever chair.
Huang's exit followed reports of two extramarital affairs, including one with a woman described as an alleged Chinese spy.
This matters for Nebius more than for most stocks. Nvidia supplies the chips that neoclouds rent out, has invested in several of them and has backstopped some of their projects. Nvidia held about $329 million of Nebius shares at the end of June, according to a filing.
Nvidia closed down 4.3% at $166.19, after sinking as much as 14% early in the session. It now reports earnings next week without the man who ran it for 33 years.
The selling spread across the AI cloud names. CoreWeave tumbled 6.9% to $56.60, a day after its big rally, and IREN slid 6.5%. For a group that borrows heavily, the backdrop got worse, too: the 10-year Treasury yield climbed back above 5% during the session. We explained why 5% yields change the math for AI builders.
Not every chip stock fell. AMD jumped 5.9% to $585.30 after it introduced a new MI450X data center GPU, picked up an upgrade from William Blair and drew investors looking at Nvidia's rivals.
At 4:01 p.m., the Nasdaq was down 0.4% at 25,366.09, the S&P 500 was down 0.3% at 7,592.92 and the Dow was down 0.4%, or 189 points lower, at 52,297.81.
What Lands Next
Cisco and Applied Materials report after Thursday's close, with options pricing moves of about 7.5% in each.
The October Producer Price Index comes out Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET. After a hot consumer inflation report this week, another strong reading would add to the case for a December Fed rate hike.
Next week brings Nvidia's earnings and Anthropic's expected IPO pricing, two events that will test how much the AI trade can absorb at once.
Nebius did almost everything a growth company is supposed to do this quarter. It sold more, charged more and got paid up front. On Thursday, that couldn't outrun a slipped schedule, a bigger spending bill and a CEO exit at the company the whole industry depends on.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.
Found this helpful? Share it with others.