Nebius plans to spend $40 billion to $45 billion building AI infrastructure in 2027 — and it intends to pay for most of that buildout with its own customers’ money, through prepayments and loans backed by customer contracts. Why it matters: the plan is the boldest test yet of the “neocloud” playbook, and it comes with a warning sign attached — the New Jersey data center behind Nebius’s biggest contract is already months behind schedule.
November 13, 2026
What Nebius announced
Laying out the plan on its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the Amsterdam-based AI cloud company said prepayments plus asset-backed financing of investment-grade contracts are expected to cover up to 85% of the 2027 spending. Chief financial officer Maria Del Dado Alonso Sanchez named the company’s Microsoft and Meta contracts as the kind that can be financed this way, and chief revenue officer Marc Boroditsky said new deals signed in the third quarter carried prepayments that more than cover the cost of the capacity behind them. The $40 billion headline figure was far above what Wall Street had expected.
The quarter itself shows both the growth and the strain. Third-quarter revenue was $981 million, up 571% from a year earlier — though roughly a third of it was a one-time payment tied to a new partnership model. Nebius cut its 2026 revenue forecast by $200 million to $3 billion, citing delays at third-party sites, and ended the quarter with $7.4 billion in cash. For 2027 it forecast revenue of $12 billion to $13 billion and said it expects to break even on a pre-tax basis by the fourth quarter. Shares ended Thursday down 17%.
The New Jersey problem
One of Nebius’s largest customers is Microsoft, which is paying for AI computing capacity at a data center in Vineland, New Jersey, under a contract worth up to $19.4 billion. That site is now months behind schedule: only just over half of the Microsoft capacity is planned for delivery by the end of this year, with the rest pushed to the second quarter of 2027 — well beyond the 2025 and 2026 deployment window in the original tranches. According to Nebius’s own summary of the contract, Microsoft can terminate affected service after a grace period if dates are missed and no alternative capacity is offered, and the contract includes financial penalties for late delivery.
Nebius attributes the delay to DataOne, the site’s third-party operator, which it says wound down temporary power generation faster than expected while switching to Bloom Energy fuel cells; New Jersey regulators previously fined the facility $1.1 million after investigators found dozens of natural gas generators operating without permits. Nebius says the delays are concentrated at sites it does not control, that the data centers it builds itself are on time or ahead of schedule, and that those self-built sites will supply most of its new capacity from 2027. “Building at this scale is hard, and delays are part of our industry right now,” chief executive Arkady Volozh said on the call. “We are not immune.”
Why it matters
Nebius is effectively using the future value of its data centers to finance their construction — a model that works beautifully while capacity arrives on time and hyperscalers keep signing, and gets expensive fast when either stops. Bloomberg has reported that Microsoft is tightening oversight of third-party neocloud projects, including Nebius’s, which raises the stakes on every slipped deadline. For anyone buying AI compute, the lesson is practical: the cheapest capacity on paper is only cheap if it actually switches on. Nebius has the cash, the contracts and the growth rate to pull this off — but 2027 is now a year where it has to execute almost flawlessly, in public, at a scale few companies have attempted.
Frequently asked questions
How will Nebius pay for a $40 billion buildout?
Mostly with customer prepayments and asset-backed loans tied to investment-grade customer contracts, which the company expects to cover up to 85% of its $40 billion to $45 billion in planned 2027 capital spending.
What is happening with Nebius’s Microsoft contract?
The contract, worth up to $19.4 billion, covers capacity at a Vineland, New Jersey data center that is months behind schedule. Just over half the capacity is now expected by the end of this year, with the rest in the second quarter of 2027.
How did Nebius perform in the third quarter?
Revenue was $981 million, up 571% year over year, though about a third was a one-time payment. Nebius cut its 2026 revenue forecast to $3 billion and forecast $12 billion to $13 billion for 2027.
Sources: TechCrunch, Bloomberg reporting via TechCrunch, Nebius third-quarter earnings materials