SA Torches IREN

It's sometimes good to step back and relish the difference between Nebius and their competitors. Watching Nebius execute at the level they are at, day after day, is exquisite.

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IREN continues to come up in our conversations with neocloud customers, and usually for the wrong reasons. In Prince George and Mackenzie in Northern BC, Canada, we’ve heard the stories: multi-day power outages, network upgrades, storage failures, air quality controls leading to link flaps, XIDs everywhere. The #1 worst site in the industry, according to users.

And we are some of their users, as we’ve gotten to test IREN GPUs from multiple providers that resell their capacity. A lot of our users we are hearing from who aren’t having a good time aren’t renting from IREN resellers, but from IREN themselves.

With that said, the new builds in Childress and Sweetwater look much better (read: not N+0 power, cooling, and ISPs!). We’ve covered plenty about these sites in our Datacenter Model; suffice it to say that despite all the technical shortcomings in their cloud services, we expect the $2.1B investment from NVIDIA will help them cut fewer corners this time around.

We recommend that IREN stop falsely claiming to offer managed clusters in public investment materials, such as in their most recent 10-K, where they claimed to "own and operate" all layers of the stack, including "managed cloud services."

Their CCO was correct when he recently said, "we don't have any live managed services today."

IREN should focus on their bare metal offerings, where there is plenty of market demand for their services.

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u/Think-Feynman — 7 days ago

Nebulizer’s Guide to Nebius (Part 2: Act 1)

Part 2 is out, and this one gets right to the heart of the Nebius thesis: what exactly is Nebius selling?

The answer is a lot more than GPUs. Nebius is building up the stack from bare-metal compute, to AI Cloud, to Token Factory, and now into agentic infrastructure. Each layer moves it further away from commodity GPU rental and toward higher-value software and platform economics.

That’s the part I think matters most. The long-term bet on Nebius isn’t just that AI compute demand keeps growing. It’s that Nebius can capture more and more of the value sitting on top of that compute.

Excellent breakdown, especially if you’re trying to understand why “full stack” is such an important part of the story.

smasimho.substack.com
u/Think-Feynman — 15 days ago

Weekend Reading - A Framework for the Next Decade of Investing

A deep dive by Daniel Koss on the future of AI, and what it means for AI infrastructure investors. Worth a read for Nebius investors!

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u/Think-Feynman — 1 month ago

Auctions are setting a new price for larger contracts.

From AndersInvests:

$NBIS

I am surprised this detail from the Fireside at Goldman's communcacopia + technology conference is not receiving more attention.

"Raising the list price didn't cool anything. It was tried, demand stayed. So the company ran an experimental Blackwell auction a few weeks ago. It came in about 15 to 20% above any previous price these were sold out, after those raises. The winners were happy because they got capacity they could actually count on. A few more of these will run, including with self serve customers, and used as a reference when pricing bigger deals."

So the auctions effectively raise the price threshold for larger contracts. I read this as a clear signal that the final hyperscaler deal will be enormous.

This dynamic will certainly impact the mid tier contracts we have been seeing around the 1 billion mark as well.

What a powerful tool to pull the price anchor upward to the highest bidder. This massively shifts my ARR expectations for the end of 2026 and 2027.

Crazy long $NBIS

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u/Think-Feynman — 1 month ago

The Palantir Deal from a Nebius Insider

From @demian_ai:

i work at nebius, so take the following with that in mind.

today @PalantirTech named @nebiusai its preferred sovereign ai infrastructure partner.

most people will screenshot the logos (and this is a big one). The real story is where the compute sits.

most “sovereign AI” talk still means a region dropdown: same closed model, different flag on the rack.

but that is not this.

sovereign ai, in this deal, is two halves that finally touch:

  1. who is allowed to touch the data and the model

  2. where the model actually runs

palantir’s half is the authorisation and isolation layer, aip, ontology, foundry, apollo. Who can see what, which model can touch which data, how an org keeps the advantage it trains instead of leaking it into someone else’s frontier system.

what a lot of their commercial customers still lacked was the other half: ai-native compute and inference that lives inside that perimeter, not bolted on as a separate hyperscaler account.

that’s the half we build.

After the integration period, eligible Palantir customers get our compute and inference endpoints inside the palantir enterprise perimeter. open models, adapted on their own data, for their own domain. Control of compute, data, and the model that comes out the other side.

Karp put it cleanly: our infrastructure powers your ability to run your own models under conditions you control. ontology + infra undergird the sovereignty partners are demanding.

Arkady’s complementary line is the one i hear from customers every week: they need performance at scale and control. most buyers have been forced to pick one.

what this does for palantir:

the sovereign ai operating system stops ending at software. Preferred infra inside the perimeter is how you sell sovereignty to commercial orgs that never had a clean option.

-> their distribution. our runtime. one boundary

what this does for us:

it puts capacity where the hard buying decision already happened. Not only startups chasing gpus, enterprises that already standardized on foundry/aip and were still stuck on where the tokens actually run.

Preferred partner status plugs ai-native infra into a sales motion that already exists. Training and inference land next to the data loop that lets open models beat generic closed ones on a specific domain.

We’ll work together to bring new capacity online faster, including modular data center deployments at sites where power is already available.

not infinite cloud, power-first capacity. The physical constraint named inside a software partnership.

Sovereignty without isolation is cosplay

Isolation without compute is a brochure

Compute without power is a waitlist

today is the claim that those three can be sold as one stack

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u/Think-Feynman — 1 month ago
▲ 138 r/Palantir_Investors+1 crossposts

Nebius / Palantir Sovereign AI Deal

I think people are underestimating the sovereign AI angle of the Palantir deal. This isn't just Nebius adding another big-name customer. Palantir has named Nebius its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner. That potentially puts Nebius underneath Palantir deployments for governments and large enterprises that want to control their own data, models and compute. That market is going to be enormous.

A lot of countries and regulated industries simply aren't going to be comfortable handing their entire AI stack to AWS, Microsoft or Google. They want AI infrastructure in their own jurisdiction, under their own control, with very clear rules around where the data lives and who has access to it.

Palantir already has the customer relationships, software, security and credibility to sell into those environments. Nebius brings the AI infrastructure, GPUs, inference and data center capacity. It’s a perfect fit.

And from an investor standpoint, the part I really like is the leverage. Nebius doesn't have to win every sovereign AI customer one at a time. Palantir can effectively become a distribution channel that brings Nebius into opportunities it might otherwise take years to penetrate.

It also fits very well with the asset-light model Nebius has been moving toward. If the demand is already there through a partner like Palantir, Nebius can add capacity around committed workloads instead of building huge amounts of infrastructure on spec. That means better capital efficiency, faster payback and potentially much less need to fund every expansion entirely off its own balance sheet.

I have no idea what the near-term revenue from this deal will be, and I wouldn't try to put a precise number on it yet. But if this turns into even a handful of large sovereign or enterprise deployments, you're potentially talking hundreds of millions in annual revenue. If it becomes a repeatable architecture, it could eventually be much bigger than that.

To me, this is another sign that Nebius is moving well beyond being a company that rents GPUs. They're building the infrastructure layer for AI.

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u/GameCubedArtist — 1 month ago

What an Enterprise Buyer Thinks About Nebius

A great post by M.V. Cunha.

What an Enterprise Buyer Thinks About Nebius

I recently had a really interesting conversation with an enterprise buyer and client of $NBIS, who leads data and AI platform architecture at a Fortune 500 medtech company and previously worked in a similar role at a Fortune 50 pharma.

I found his perspective valuable because it offers a useful way to differentiate between the so-called “neoclouds.”

Most of the market tends to focus on GPU supply, CapEx, power availability and how quickly companies like Nebius can bring new capacity online. From the enterprise-buyer side, though, he argued that one of the bigger constraints on AI adoption is often data gravity, not simply compute availability.

Large regulated enterprises can’t just move AI workloads wherever GPUs happen to be cheapest. Their data is already deeply embedded within governed environments involving lineage, security, compliance and existing infrastructure. Moving that data, or changing where workloads run, can therefore be much more complicated than it may appear from the outside.

I think this point is particularly relevant when comparing Nebius with other AI infrastructure providers. Over time, the competitive advantage may not simply come down to who can offer the cheapest GPUs, but who can bring scalable AI infrastructure closer to enterprise data while also meeting the security, governance and reliability requirements these customers need.

He also raised another point that I think could become increasingly important: AI inference spending inside enterprise platforms can grow much faster than many teams initially expect.

Tools like Snowflake Cortex and Databricks Mosaic make it extremely easy for companies to integrate AI into pipelines and applications. That simplicity is obviously part of their appeal, but it can also hide the underlying compute cost. Teams can scale usage quickly without necessarily seeing the full financial impact until much later.

As inference becomes embedded across more workflows, dashboards and internal applications, those costs can compound quietly and eventually create what he described as a potential “cost wall” for large enterprises.

That’s also where Token Factory becomes interesting.

There are already several platforms competing to make inference easier and cheaper, but Nebius controls much more of the underlying infrastructure stack. If Token Factory can leverage that integration to provide lower and more predictable inference costs at scale, it could become one of the more differentiated parts of the ecosystem.

In other words, Nebius’ long-term advantage extends well beyond simply owning GPUs. Its full-stack approach allows it to structurally lower inference costs while still meeting the reliability, security and enterprise requirements large customers need. That value proposition is increasingly valuable as AI workloads move from experimentation into large-scale production.

It’s also worth putting this in the context of where AI infrastructure demand is coming from today. So far, much of the attention has been on frontier AI labs, hyperscalers and AI-native startups, where access to compute, speed of deployment and raw performance often matter more than some of the enterprise considerations discussed above.

But over time, I think a much broader wave of demand will come from large enterprises moving AI workloads into production at scale. That’s when issues like the ones mentioned above should become increasingly important. In that sense, some of the factors that may not matter as much to the biggest buyers today could become much more relevant to the next phase of AI infrastructure demand.

From the enterprise side, the questions are increasingly becoming: Where does the data live? How difficult is it to move? How well does the infrastructure integrate with the existing enterprise stack? And what happens to inference costs once usage scales materially?

Those are very different competitive dynamics from the ones investors usually focus on when comparing neoclouds, and I think they’re worth paying attention to.

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u/Think-Feynman — 1 month ago

Nebulizer on X: "🇬🇧$NBIS: East London 1

Green Mountain announced today that a major Neocloud customer will occupy the recently delivered 14MW expansion at its LON-East campus. This is the final piece in

$NBIS's 65MW UK expansion: Harlow, Newport, and now Romford.

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u/Think-Feynman — 1 month ago

Daniel Koss's Take on the Raise

$NBIS convert raise terms are out!

Facts:

Nebius upsized the deal from $4.5B to $5.0B, with an option to reach $5.75B. Net proceeds are ~$4.94B, or ~$5.68B with the option exercised.

$3B due 2030: 0.50% coupon, $313.46 conversion price, +40% premium.

$2B due 2034: 4.50% coupon, $324.65 conversion price, +45% premium.

Including principal accretion, effective conversion prices at maturity are ~$345 and ~$406.

The money is explicitly (and obviously) going toward data centers, GPUs, footprint expansion and the AI cloud.

If the full $5B new convert were eventually settled entirely in shares, it represents ~15.7M shares. Nebius can also settle in cash or a mix, so that dilution is NOT guaranteed.

They are also exchanging $800M of old converts for ~15.8M shares, but those old notes already represented ~15.55M potential shares.

!! So most of that “dilution” was already embedded !!

tl;dr expected raise, good terms, onwards.

Not sure why people pee their pants because of this 😂

We learned that their economics / MW are amazing. Now let them build the MW! That costs money.

They want to build A LOT.

The shareholders that cry today are the same people that will laugh because of the ARR growth soon.

As long as you don't sell lol

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u/Think-Feynman — 2 months ago

Vineland Hearing Recap

I thought I would do a recap of what I heard and a few thoughts about the Vineland hearing and process. I didn’t listen to all of it, but I did at the beginning and checked in through the evening to see what was happening, and then in the last hour I listened to the public commenting and the vote.

The one testimony that I thought represented the biggest risk was the engineer that said he had reviewed the plans and didn’t believe the runoff water system was adequate. The board did acknowledge that he was an expert witness, so that rang a couple of alarm bells for me. However, it’s a public hearing, so there wasn’t a deep dive on his concerns, but the Data One engineer did reiterate that the plan was properly done. In the end, the board noted it, but it didn’t matter.

I won’t go into all the silly questions and comments from the public commenting session, but it struck me as to how much factually incorrect information was being spread. Notions like no taxes would be paid for 20 years (false), upset about the landscaping (it’s under construction), water and power use concerns, terrorist attacks, LP gas is dangerous, and my favorite – it’s a Ponzi scheme funded by bitcoin!

But here’s the thing – SustainSJ was not interested in learning anything, or improving the outcome, they were there to stop it. Nothing any official or engineer said was going to make any difference for them. Their entire goal was to stop construction of the Data Center. Impassioned pleas about how the board had a responsibility, and the power, to put a halt to this madness were numerous.

However, one of the board members actually called out Data One and Nebius for being a good corporate citizen. He mentioned that they had worked hard to improve the plan, and doing things like switching from the rather noisy Bergen power system (which was already approved) to Bloom Energy was something that Nebius brought to the table when they didn’t have to. They also worked hard on noise abatement changes, even when they were already in compliance.

He also noted that Nebius could have drilled their own wells and taken the water that way, but that the city water system had plenty of supply, which actually was good revenue for the city. It’s not raising water rates, at all.  

I saw a post on X (and didn’t save it), that cited a study by an outside group that has a history of being negative on data centers, and their response was that they thought the plan was exemplary and should be the model for other data center projects. Whoa. Nebius is definitely the good guy tuna company on the porpoise team (IYKYK).

A few more notes:

One of the board member did say that they could have done a better job of communications over the last couple of years. Not sure if that was lip service or if they really felt that way, but did call it out.

I learned a lot about how this data center water usage compares to other businesses. While 8 million gallons of water (the yearly base case) sounds like a lot, a typical golf course uses 30-100 million gallons of water per year. A medium-size restaurant uses 2 million. Other industries will use a lot more than that, and no one would be complaining if any of those were going in, except it’s a data center.

The noise complaints revolved around the construction, not the operations. I get it, but they are complying with the building codes for hours of work, and other regs, but building stuff happens. Get over it.

One of the funnier moments for me was when a board member said that it wasn’t up to him to decide what was being built, and that owners had the right to do what they wanted with the land as long as it met building codes. Well, that got hoots and exasperation from the peanut gallery. He went on to say, jokingly, that he would have rather have a golf course, but he didn’t have the right to dictate anything like that, and the board’s job was to make sure whatever was being built was compliant. He’s right.

I didn’t think the board would vote no, but I also wasn’t sure they wouldn’t postpone a decision to evaluate legitimate concerns. However, this has dragged on for months, and everyone wanted to bring it to a conclusion.

I’m sure there will be lawsuits (who is funding that?) and other machinations to stop the data center. But, in the end, it’s over. The good guys won.

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u/Think-Feynman — 2 months ago
▲ 129 r/RecordPlayerRepair+1 crossposts

Hudson Ultrasonic Stylus Cleaner

Played a record the other night and it sounded horrible like the stylus was dirty. But cleaning didn't do a thing. I couldn't really see what was going on, but I pulled out my somewhat of a toy microscope I got for my grandkids, and did an inspection. It looked like a linty ball of goo! It was a very old record that might have had a beer spilled on it back in 1978, and I had cleaned it rather superficially, obviously. That record goes in the trash.

Repeated attempts with my stylus brush did nothing. Fearing I would damage the cantilever, I searched online and got a Hudson ultrasonic stylus cleaner. It just came today, and after 5 seconds the result was dramatic.

BTW, I got it on Amazon for $28. It was a little plastic thing, and came with fluid, but it did work as advertised. I won't use it often, but nice to know I have it.

Ignore the timestamp. The battery was dead and I didn't bother to reset the date.

u/Think-Feynman — 2 months ago

Updated Price Targets

Thought this would be a nice way to close out the week! Enjoy. We've earned it.

u/Think-Feynman — 2 months ago

Northwise Nebius Analysis Update

A lot of people looked at our latest public $NBIS model and thought the numbers were insane.

2030 valuation:

Bear: $458

Base: $1,652

Bull: $3,425

Probability-weighted value: $1,916

Click link for full article.

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u/Think-Feynman — 2 months ago

Another very strong data point for the AI infrastructure buildout just dropped

Another very strong data point for the AI infrastructure buildout just dropped.

$LITE reported revenue of $1.01B, up 109% YoY, and guided next quarter to $1.225B to $1.275B.

Think about that trajectory:

$808M last quarter

$1.01B this quarter

~$1.25B guided next quarter

And this is coming from a company selling the optical infrastructure needed to connect increasingly massive AI clusters.

Even more impressive, Lumentum is guiding non GAAP operating margins to 39.5% to 40.5% next quarter.

The AI infrastructure boom isn’t showing signs of slowing down. It’s accelerating.

For $NBIS, this is exactly what you want to see the night before earnings.

Demand across the AI infrastructure stack remains absolutely enormous.

Now NBIS just needs to show us they can execute into it. 👊

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u/Think-Feynman — 2 months ago

CK Capital on the Michael Burry short

From CK Capital on X

Michael Burry is short $NBIS

Worth understanding who’s on the other side of that trade.

Arkady Volozh started building search technology in 1989, a year before the Soviet Union collapsed. He founded a search software company in 1990 and spent the next several years building electronic search for patents, Russian classical literature, and the Bible.

In 1997, one year before Google existed, he co-founded Yandex. He ran it as CEO for 25 years and built it into the dominant search engine of an entire country, one of the very few places on earth where Google does not win.

He took it public on Nasdaq in 2011 and grew it to roughly $30 billion, expanding into maps, ride hailing, e-commerce, cloud, autonomous vehicles, and machine learning.

Then in 2022 he lost essentially all of it. Sanctioned personally, forced to step down from the company he spent a quarter century building, and in exile. Yandex sold its Russian assets for $5.4 billion.

Most people end their career there. He was 60.

He kept the international AI and cloud business, renamed it Nebius, relisted on Nasdaq in October 2024, and started over from a nearly empty building outside Amsterdam with 200 employees.

Since then.

Nvidia invested and now holds a 9.3% stake. Microsoft signed a deal worth up to $19.4 billion. Meta signed up to $27 billion. Reflection AI added over $1 billion. Revenue grew 684% year over year. Contracted backlog is over $46 billion.

He built a company that beat Google in its home market, lost it to geopolitics, and rebuilt a multi billion dollar AI infrastructure business from scratch in under two years.

That’s the operator Burry is betting against.

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u/Think-Feynman — 2 months ago

Daniel Koss's post this morning

Roman (Nebius Co Founder) said during the -40% stock drawdown during the DeepSeek panic they had their best week in sales ever.

Now we get more OpenSource progress (insanely bullish for Nebius - that will host them / offer these models to customers and now offers a much better ROI).

What does the market do? $NBIS down almost 50% from ATH.

Can't make this shit up xD

No doubt in my mind Nebius is currently seeing ridiculous demand and the REAL business is absolutely crushing it RIGHT NOW. Again. Exact same reality to narrative disconnect.

Yaya I get it. Risk off, high beta, inflation, blabla.

At the end of the day Nebius will print money like crazy and the facts are painting a very bullish picture that just keeps getting better every day. Ironically, especially over the last few weeks during the selloff. More data centers than expected. Super fast international expansion. OpenSource CRUSHING it.

I have zero doubt price will catch up to reality again and then all the doubters will magically change their opinions again.

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u/Think-Feynman — 3 months ago

Daniel Koss's take on the Nebius announcement today

That's how $NBIS goes to $1,000

This is probably the biggest announcement and most important strategic decisions in the company's history.

It will take time until the market understands how huge this is.

Let me try to explain how massive this is:

- Nebius can now add capacity 10x faster

- without ANY dilution

- or capex

- or risk

- with ultra high margins

- globally

- in parallel

- while simultaneously making their offering better for customers

This sounds too good to be true, what's the "trick"?

Nebius has the best team and expertise in the AI Cloud game. This is their way of leveraging that and their NVDIA relationship (and NVDIA owns the supply chain, no matter what anyone says...).

The one ugly side of their business has always been the high capex. I believe the capex is super worth it and will deliver very high ROIC. But this is them creating an alternative world in which they completely crush it WITHOUT a ton of capex and dilution.

There are probably millions of entrepreneurs globally who have good connections to local governments, access to money and want to participate in the AI buildout. But they lack the expertise to deliver the product quality of Nebius and will never match it.

All the ex Bitcoin miners like $IREN are in this camp.

They are now facing the option to combine their strengths and the best of both worlds.

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u/Think-Feynman — 3 months ago