What Meta’s Nebius Deal Signals

If you’ve got a ticket on the AI gravy train, times are good. That could be because you’re a supplier to Nvidia—and therefore enjoying booming business, as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pointed out in his speech on Monday at the company’s GTC convention. Or it could be because you’re a small data center operator picking up business from a big tech giant looking for extra computing capacity. 

Take Nebius, a Netherlands-based data center firm, whose stock rocketed 15% on Monday after it announced that Meta Platforms had agreed to spend up to $27 billion over several years renting its cloud capacity. This deal also demonstrates how Meta, despite planning to spend $125 billion on capital expenditures expanding its AI computing facilities this year, needs more capacity, right now. That is prompting it to tap outside cloud firms to supplement its own facilities.