u/Eraserhead-_-_-

Citi analyst Tyler Radke raised the price target for Nebius from $278 to $324 and maintained the "Buy" rating.

Citi revised its company estimates upward due to strong artificial intelligence demand and order backlog supporting capacity investments.

I honestly can’t wait for Q3 earnings. I think Q3 and Q4 are where NBIS numbers can start getting ridiculous.  

1. Management has been telling us for months that the biggest capacity ramp happens in H2, with a meaningful step-up in Q3 and another one in Q4. Microsoft volumes are also heavily weighted toward these quarters.
   One thing I definitely wouldn’t ignore: this management team has built a pretty strong history of underpromising and overdelivering. They tend to guide conservatively, hit what they promised, and then come back with better numbers or bigger plans. So when they repeatedly tell us that the biggest ramp is still ahead, I’m inclined to take that seriously.
2. The math is already pretty obvious. NBIS did around $981M revenue in H1 and still guides for $3.0-3.4B for the full year. So they need roughly $2.0-2.4B in H2. That’s around $1.0-1.2B per quarter on average versus $582M in Q2.
3. And every new MW is worth much more now. We went from roughly $12M ACV/MW assumptions to $20-25M/MW on recent deals, while some short-term capacity is now being sold at $40-50M/MW. More MW + much higher revenue per MW is a pretty nice combination.
4. On top of that, we now have additional revenue streams that basically didn’t exist a year ago - asset-light partnerships, Token Factory, inference, auctions, premium short-term capacity. Some of these should also be much less capital intensive than building everything ourselves.
5. 2027 is where it gets even more interesting. Andrey Korolenko said they expect to add more capacity in H1 2027 than during all of 2026!!!
   Management also said they could basically sell all planned 2027 capacity today, but they are intentionally keeping some uncommitted because pricing keeps going higher. Q3 should also be when we get the first proper 2027 guidance, and we have every reason to believe that guidance will be well above current market expectations.
6. And then there is the macro side. Midterms are in November. If the Iran conflict gets resolved or at least materially de-escalates before then, which I personally think is quite possible, you remove another major source of oil/inflation/market risk right when NBIS should be posting its strongest numbers of the year.

 
That’s why I think Q3 and Q4 can be a real turning point. We don’t even need some surprise hyperscaler deal for the thesis to work. The capacity ramp is already coming, demand is there, and pricing per MW keeps improving.

My base target for the end of 2026 is $450+. By then I think the market will care much less about 2026 revenue and much more about what this business can earn in 2027.

Guys, I know this price action is painful to watch. In moments like this, I try to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. One potential NBIS catalyst I never really thought about before: Russian capital.

The Russia - Ukraine war will end eventually. Maybe this year, maybe next year. Sanctions relief is one of Moscow’s key demands. Since 2022, Russian investors’ access to Western securities has been severely restricted by a combination of sanctions, frozen settlement infrastructure and domestic restrictions. Reopening that access could bring a huge amount of Russian capital back into Western markets.

I have Russian-speaking friends, and it’s hard to overstate how highly they think of Yandex and Arkady Volozh. These people used Yandex products for years and many invested in Yandex stock.

Inflation expectations in Russia remain in double digits, while the Russian stock market has been in freefall. Russian investors have every incentive to move capital outside the country, and I think that could eventually translate into billions of USD - potentially even tens of billions - flowing into Nebius stock.

If Russian investors eventually regain access to Western markets, I think Nebius will be one of the first names they look at. There are potentially hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of investors who already know Volozh, trust the Yandex engineering legacy and would be happy to own Nebius. Even a fraction of that capital flowing into NBIS could mean billions in additional demand. And I don’t think the market is pricing this in at all.

I checked Michael Burry’s short bets over the last two years.

Across 19 cases with enough data, the stocks fell by an average of about 2.0% in the first trading session after his bearish position became public. 12 out of 19 went down.
That actually suggests the market tends to copy Burry immediately after his positions are disclosed.

But the longer-term picture is very different. Of the 6 trades that already have a full one-year track record, the underlying stocks were up about 12.6% on average after a year, with 3 out of 6 trading higher.

So at least based on this sample, I don’t see evidence that Burry has some special ability to consistently identify overvalued stocks. What he does appear to have is enough reputation to move the market in his direction immediately after his trades become public.

Hey buddy who shorted NBIS, considering what happened over the last two trading days, could you give us an update on your position? Are you planning to keep holding it till it will be liquidated, or do you have a specific price at which you’ll finally close the short?

I’m about 90% sure that screenshot came from a paper-trading account - or that the image was simply fake. But either way, I honestly don’t even want to troll you.

In the unlikely event that you really did make such an irrational and reckless decision, I can only imagine the pain you’re feeling right now. For almost anyone, $5.7 million is an enormous amount of money, and a loss like that could seriously affect your mental health. Hopefully, you’re financially stable enough to handle it.

Either way, I genuinely hope you’ll be okay. Maybe it’s time to consider switching sides and going long. At this rate, you might recover those losses surprisingly quickly.

The typical investor assumes that the market is broadly rational and that a company’s current share price reflects some combination of its underlying value and prevailing market sentiment.
Yesterday was another reminder that this is not true.

In the short term, a stock price can be driven by countless forces that remain completely invisible to retail investors.
We did not know that Leopold was running with 4x leverage. We did not know that several buyers were competing to acquire Situational Awareness - or whatever remained of it after the margin calls. We did not know that Citadel was among the potential buyers while a false rumor about a Fed rate hike was spreading through the market by them.

I do not want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, and I am not claiming to have proof of coordinated manipulation. But under the current administration, it increasingly feels as though the stock market has become a playground for powerful actors with access to information, capital, and influence that retail investors simply do not possess. And the SEC does absolutely nothing about it.

It would not surprise me if, alongside the rate-hike FUD, aggressive coordinated shorting of NBIS, CRWV, IREN, and BE by potential buyers also contributed to the pressure on Leopold’s fund. Nor would it surprise me if Jim Cramer’s Monday comment - “Sell everything data-center-related”- became part of the coordinated broader wave of fear that ultimately helped push Leopold toward a margin call.
Again, I cannot prove that any of this was coordinated. But the sequence of events is remarkable enough to deserve serious scrutiny.

I took two lessons from all of this:

1 - Stop trying to rationalize every short-term move in a stock price. Forecasts matter over a horizon of years, not hours or days. A collapsing share price does not necessarily mean that the company’s direction, fundamentals, or long-term opportunity have deteriorated.

2 - Please, I am begging someone: make a movie about how Leopold’s fund was so elegantly taken away from him. The real events already read like a finished screenplay, complete with leverage, margin calls, competing buyers, market rumors, short sellers, and one plot twist after another.

One of Warren Buffett’s core investing principles is simple: management matters. Among the CEOs of publicly traded companies, no one inspires more confidence in me than Arkady Volozh.

It is not only because Yandex, under his leadership, became the dominant technology company in Russia - comparable in local importance to Google, but with an even broader range of businesses. He built it from the ground up in the chaos of 1990s Russia, a true Wild West for business.

More importantly, Nebius is personal to him. Arkady spent 25 years building a technology empire, only to lose control of it because of geopolitics. He could have remained within Putin’s system, but instead chose not to cooperate with the state. He accepted cents on the dollar for Yandex and renounced his Russian citizenship.

Arkady is simply built differently. Few people are as prepared for the obstacles ahead. Few can see the path from zero to a global technology leader as clearly and realistically as he can.

We are in good hands. He is building a revolutionary, potentially legendary company. I would not be surprised if, within seven to ten years, Nebius becomes the largest European company by market capitalization.

Recently, I watched an interesting piece about lottery addiction in the United States, and I noticed several parallels with the stock market.

The poorest 10% of Americans reportedly buy 80% of all lottery tickets in the hope of winning millions. Meanwhile, 40% of Americans say that winning the lottery is their only realistic way to accumulate several thousand dollars. Obviously, that is not true. But it shows how destructive the desire to make quick money can be.

One particularly revealing example is the story of Leo McCord from Chicago. Since 1974, while working as a cab driver and collecting bottles and cans for extra cash, he has spent 15 USD on lottery tickets every day.
Over the course of 52 years, Leo has won several times, including a one-time prize of 100 000 USD. Yet he is still broke and currently works as a security guard at a college. Had Leo invested the same 15 USD per day in the S&P 500, his portfolio could be worth approximately 14 153 084 USD today.

There are several lessons to take from this story:

1. The stock market provides a unique opportunity to build wealth, but it requires financial discipline, consistency, and patience.
2. Gamblers do not win in the long run. You may hit the jackpot once, but over time, the odds will catch up with you. Gambling is a tax on stupid people.
3. If you invested in NBIS simply because you kept seeing the ticker on Reddit, I have bad news for you: you are not an investor, and you are not a day trader. You are a trend-following gambler - the kind who buys overhyped stocks near the top and sells them after they collapse.
   The good news is that there are no meaningful barriers to becoming a real investor. You can conduct your own due diligence on NBIS, analyze its business, risks, valuation, and long-term prospects, and perhaps independently conclude that, over a period of several years, NBIS represents one of the most compelling long-term investment opportunities in the market.

Yes, the price action sucks. No matter how long your investment horizon is or what your price target may be, that target feels much more attainable when NBIS is trading at 300 rather than 171. This hurts.

However, the only question that truly matters is whether the business is in a better position than it was two weeks ago. It absolutely is. The market simply hasn’t priced it in yet.

Nebius Group
Nebius introduces business model to scale AI cloud globally through infrastructure partnerships
15-Jul-2026 / 14:30 CET/CEST
The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

Nebius introduces business model to scale AI cloud globally through infrastructure partnerships
Pairs Nebius’s systems architecture, software stack and customers with partner capacity
Gives data center developers, infrastructure investors, regional operators and national AI projects worldwide route to tap fast-growing AI cloud market
Generates high-margin revenue stream with minimal incremental capital requirements
Amsterdam, July 15, 2026 — Nebius (Nasdaq: NBIS), the AI cloud company, today announced a new business model that lets infrastructure partners deploy Nebius’s full-stack AI cloud platform in their own AI data centers. The model brings additional capacity to Nebius customers, and expands the availability of value-added AI compute globally at a time when demand continues to outstrip supply.
Under the model, partners finance and own the infrastructure and hardware, and operate the data centers. Nebius supplies its systems architecture and supply-chain access; deploys and maintains its hardware design and software and services stack on the partner infrastructure; and takes the resulting capacity to market through its global sales organization. 
Partners get fully-owned AI infrastructure assets, designed to Nebius standards, and a fast route to serve the AI cloud market. Nebius’s architecture and platform transform a partner’s raw capacity into a production-ready AI cloud, which Nebius then connects to customers. Because Nebius brings the demand, partners can begin generating a return as soon as the capacity goes live.
For Nebius, this asset-light approach expands the capacity it can offer its customers, such as AI natives and enterprises, with minimal incremental capital requirements. Partners’ data centers will join the Nebius capacity pool, adding incremental capacity to that coming online from Nebius’s owned data centers and colocations.
Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius, said: 
“Our new asset-light model gives infrastructure partners a flexible way to benefit from the explosive growth of AI. Our software allows partners to reach a much wider customer base with much better margins than conventional wholesale bare-metal contracts. We're inviting data center investors, regional partners and others with capacity or capital to contribute to join us in serving this demand – combining their assets and local strengths with Nebius's technology, platform, operational expertise and customer demand.”
Nebius anticipates pursuing a variety of economic arrangements under this partnership model, including revenue-sharing agreements, licensing fees and commissions, as well as committed capacity arrangements that would provide Nebius with access to additional compute to be sold to customers. The company has already entered into initial arrangements under this asset-light model.
As part of the partnership agreements, Nebius will equip partner teams to run the site and will remain responsible for the cloud software and service levels, while the partner manages the facility and hardware. Customers receive the same standard of service whether they run on Nebius’s own infrastructure or a partner’s.

Yesterday, FINRA published its latest Equity Short Interest data (www.finra.org/finra-data/browse-catalog/equity-short-interest). As of the June 30, 2026 settlement date, 61 012 064 NBIS shares were sold short. That represents a 37.7% increase from 44 297 855 shares a month earlier, bringing short interest to 30.2% of the company’s float.

I screened all companies listed on U.S. exchanges with a market capitalization above $50 billion, which produced a universe of 325 companies. Within this group, NBIS had the highest short interest as a percentage of float – by a wide margin. It was not even close. Imperial Oil Limited (IMO) ranked second, with short interest of 18.5% of float.

Does such an elevated level of short interest signal another sharp move higher? I do not think so. Is it necessarily bearish? Not in my view.
I do not expect a short squeeze. It is important to keep in mind that a meaningful portion of NBIS short interest is likely associated with convertible bond investors. These investors may short the underlying shares as part of a delta-hedging – not because they have a fundamentally bearish view of the company, but simply to hedge the equity exposure that comes with the convertible notes. In a prospectus filed with the SEC in November 2025, Nebius management stated that it expects many investors in its convertible notes to engage in short selling.

The number is unusual, but the underlying mechanics are not. In practical terms, it amounts to a nothingburger.