Nebius introduced its customer advisory board (a group of selected industry leaders who meet regularly to provide direct feedback to the company), with the most notable member being:

-Yann Lecun, one of the pioneers of deep learning and one of the most respected figures in modern AI.

-Another person who surprised me is Autumn Moulder, SVP of Engineering at Cohere. Cohere is a Canadian AI startup building secure AI models, agentic AI tools, and sovereign AI for businesses and governments, rather than consumer chatbots like ChatGPT. In some segments, it seems to compete with Nebius, but it appears they are collaborating.

More information I found about the event:

- Jensen to $NBIS at inaugural Inflection event

“You started with deep cloud engineering DNA, then rebuilt your platform for the AI era, scaling from one data center to gigawatt-scale AI factories in just two years.”

“The infrastructure must live where the demand lives.”

- CEO Arkady Volozh shared an update on the $NBIS expansion, with a 4x increase in active compute capacity this year, approaching 1 GW by year-end. The early activation of the Pennsylvania site could play a role in this, among other global sites.

So Mastercard is already a client of Nebius?

Let's hope more information comes out

Dara (CEO of Uber) on their AI spend:

"We blew through our AI budget in a quarter, for the whole year. It is forcing us to adjust.

We are going to meter headcount increases because to the extent that my engineers are getting much more efficient, their throughput is increasing. There's a cost to that, and it's a significant cost.

AI adoption has been occurring in all parts of the business –– whether it's engineers and how they scope projects, how they build, debugging, platform migrations.

I'm pushing the teams to fundamentally use the power of AI to rebuild systems and processes from the bottoms up.

I do think it's a combination for us right now of encouraging adoption, but then driving efficiency.

We're using the more expensive models to explore. Once we scale some of these experiences, we'll look to bring in more efficient models that are more efficient on a token basis or are open source."

X: @zen_tropy

Big news tomorrow?

Personally, I didn’t have very high expectations for tomorrow’s results, but today the two biggest investors in X and Peter Morley (who works at Nebius) seem to be setting us up for something.

Also, this is highly speculative, but a guy on Reddit said that Nebius signed a deal for a new data center with over 2 GW of capacity, and I think it’s the same person who commented on the deal with Meta before it was announced.

Overlooked amidst recent press releases, co. dropped their 20-F late last week. Some news, confirmatory nuggets, & potential read-through for upcoming earnings:

1. Microsoft Deal:

--Upfront prepayment pegged @ ~40% of TCV ($6.95B on $17.39B contact value), which MStanley sees as significantly “higher than expected” and well above crwv’s referenced 15-25% prepayments

--Successful delivery of 2nd tranche from Vineland detailed against a 9 tranche delivery schedule; corroboration MS has contracted service-level credit compensation & termination rights

2. DC Strategy & Dev List

--Commentary on secured contracts across Europe, Middle East & US

3. Potential Benefits from Higher Pricing

--Disclosure of a RPO @ $21.3B (pre-2nd Meta deal), plus a declaration that (outside Meta/Microsoft) “most of our customer engagements to date have relatively short term” implies possible read-through benefit from positive pricing trends

--In a note earlier this month, Mstanley marked Nebius's exposure to spot market pricing at its ~550M arr base, suggesting it could lead to near term “outperformance"

X: @zen_tropy