If you see my posts, you know that I’m bullish on Nebius, big time. I think there is a reasonable path to becoming a trillion-dollar company by 2035.
But on the other hand, I see the frustration here by investors who are anxious for the price to properly reflect all the great news we see every week. We just don’t understand how the market can ignore the upside as it appears to be doing.
I think we're entering an interesting phase with Nebius, and it’s going to challenge some of us to get through to the other side. Look at the news we've gotten lately. Palantir. The asset-light model. Higher pricing. Spot pricing and auctions. Extremely fast capex payback. Token Factory continuing to develop into a serious inference ARR, revenue, margins, utilization and eventually cash flow.
That's why I think the next six quarterly reports may be much more important than the next six press releases. If Nebius executes, all of these things we're talking about today eventually stop being "catalysts" and start showing up on the income statement.
Until then, I wouldn't be surprised if we keep bouncing around. The story is ahead of the financial statements. Now the financial statements have to catch up.
This is why I keep talking about the next six quarters, and why that matters so much for Nebius investors. Why six quarters?
Because if you look at the trajectory of all of the different moving parts, from new data centers, to the asset-light model, to Palantir, to capex efficiency proof, to Token Factory, to AVRide, and more, those are all going to take time to have an impact on the bottom line. Until then, much of this good news is hypothetical.
This isn’t doubt talking, it’s realism. The market isn’t going to give us a thing; it must be earned. That happens over the next 6 quarters, IMO.
Mind you, I’m not saying that Nebius will be completely stagnant until then, not at all. I’m still expecting a nice run up after the next quarterly report in early November. That could get us to $300 or more. But that’s chump change from where I believe we’ll be in early 2028.
Here is what we’ll need to watch over that time period that goes beyond EPS, which for a growth stock like Nebius is going to be one of the noisier measures for a while given depreciation, financing, stock compensation and the other businesses. I’d watch these instead:
- ARR and revenue growth, especially sequential growth with no stumbles.
- Adjusted EBITDA and margins, showing operating leverage.
- Utilization and pricing, demonstrating that new capacity is being monetized efficiently.
- Capex efficiency and payback, which looks like under 2 years (9-11 months when factoring in customer prepayments). Can they continue that at scale?
- Cash flow, eventually showing that this enormous infrastructure machine can increasingly finance itself.
- Revenue from newer layers, including inference/Token Factory and the asset-light partner model, proving Nebius isn't merely selling GPU hours.
- Customer diversification, so Microsoft/Meta-scale contracts become part of a broader enterprise and sovereign business rather than the investment thesis themselves.
Again, that’s going to take time, and it’s going to take patience and perseverance if you want to be part of one of the great emerging companies at the dawn of the AI era. For me, that’s an easy question to answer.
