Nvidia has made its largest strategic cloud investment to date, pouring $2 billion into Nebius Group in a deal that signals where the AI chip giant sees the next frontier of infrastructure growth.
The investment, announced on March 11, gives Nvidia an approximately 8.3% stake in the Amsterdam-based company at $94.94 per share. Nebius stock surged as much as 16% on the news, as investors rallied around what analysts are calling a blueprint for the "AI factory" model of the 2030s.
A Full-Stack Cloud Partnership
The deal goes well beyond a passive financial investment. Nvidia and Nebius will collaborate across AI infrastructure deployment, fleet management, inference optimization, and data center design. At the center of the partnership is an ambitious roadmap to deploy 5 gigawatts of Nvidia-powered computing capacity by 2030 — enough to power several of the largest data centers currently in operation worldwide.
Nebius, which was spun out of Yandex's international operations in 2024, has rapidly positioned itself as a leading "neocloud" — a new category of cloud providers built specifically for GPU-intensive AI workloads rather than general-purpose computing.
Why Neoclouds Matter
Traditional hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud were architected for broad enterprise computing. Neoclouds like Nebius, CoreWeave, and Lambda strip away that generality in favor of purpose-built AI infrastructure with tighter hardware-software integration. For Nvidia, investing directly in this layer ensures its chips sit at the heart of the fastest-growing segment of cloud spending.
The investment also reflects Nvidia's broader strategy of locking in demand ahead of its next-generation Rubin platform, which was unveiled at CES earlier this year.
Market Implications
The deal arrives as competition for AI infrastructure intensifies. Meta and AMD recently announced a $60 billion chip partnership, while Oracle is reportedly planning to lay off up to 30,000 employees to redirect billions toward data center buildouts.
For Nebius, the Nvidia backing provides both capital and credibility as it competes for enterprise contracts against far larger rivals. The company's stock had already tripled over the past year on the strength of its AI-first approach.
What to Watch
Investors and industry observers will be watching for execution details on the 5-gigawatt deployment target, which would represent a massive scaling challenge. The partnership also sets the stage for potential announcements at Nvidia's GTC conference, where CEO Jensen Huang is expected to outline the company's next moves in AI infrastructure and inference computing.
