Nebius Group stunned Wall Street on May 13, 2026, reporting first-quarter revenue of $399.0 million — a 684% jump year over year — and announcing it has secured up to 1.2 gigawatts of power and land for a new AI factory in Pennsylvania, the company's second gigawatt-scale site in the United States. Shares surged on the print, which beat analyst expectations across the top and bottom lines and showed the NVIDIA-backed AI cloud operator translating capacity buildouts into prepaid customer demand at a pace few rivals can match.
A breakout quarter
Nebius reported net income from continuing operations of $621.2 million for the quarter, reversing a $104.3 million loss in the year-earlier period. Adjusted EBITDA swung to $129.5 million from a loss of $53.7 million. The core AI cloud unit drove almost the entire result, generating $389.7 million in revenue — up roughly 841% year over year — and accounting for about 98% of group revenue.
Cash flow told an even sharper story. Operating cash flow reached $2.258 billion for the quarter, with a $3.198 billion increase in deferred revenue reflecting upfront customer prepayments for compute capacity. Capital expenditures totaled approximately $2.5 billion, directed primarily at GPU procurement and data center buildouts.
To fund the expansion, Nebius raised $6.3 billion during the quarter, including a $2 billion strategic equity investment from NVIDIA and $4.3 billion in convertible notes. The company ended March with $9.3 billion in cash and equivalents.
Pennsylvania becomes the second gigawatt site
The headline strategic disclosure was the Pennsylvania project. Nebius said it has locked in power and land sufficient for a fully owned facility scaling up to 1.2 GW. The site is expected to bring its first phase online by the end of 2027 at roughly 250 to 300 MW, then ramp by about 300 MW per year toward the full 1.2 GW footprint around the start of the next decade.
Pennsylvania joins Independence, Missouri, where Nebius broke ground on a separate 1.2 GW AI factory campus on May 12 — also targeted to scale to gigawatt levels. Together, the two sites give Nebius a multi-gigawatt owned footprint in the US at a moment when hyperscaler power constraints have become the binding limit on AI infrastructure growth.
2026 guidance and what it signals
Management reiterated full-year 2026 guidance of $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion in revenue and pointed to an exit run-rate of $7 billion to $9 billion annualized — a trajectory that, if hit, would put Nebius among the fastest-scaling AI infrastructure providers outside the hyperscaler club.
The quarter underscores how the AI buildout has shifted from speculative capacity bets to prepaid, contracted demand. Deferred revenue swelling by more than $3 billion in three months is the clearest signal yet that enterprise and frontier-lab customers are willing to commit cash years ahead of delivery to secure GPU access. With Pennsylvania and Missouri both targeting gigawatt scale, Nebius is positioning itself as a pure-play challenger to the cloud incumbents in the segment of the market where power, not silicon, is the scarcest input.
