Nebius Lowers Fiscal Year Outlook, Addresses Worries Over Financing AI Buildout

By Kelly Cloonan

Nebius Group lowered its full-year revenue outlook, citing a delay in some third-party capacity.

The artificial-intelligence cloud company also addressed recent concerns over financing its buildout, emphasizing its momentum with customer prepayments.

Nebius said Thursday it now expects full-year revenue to come in at the low end of its prior guidance range of $3 billion to $3.4 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet are forecasting $3.35 billion.

The updated guidance factors in a portion of this year's revenue moving into next year, with some third-party capacity Nebius had expected to come online this year now scheduled for the first half of 2027, the company said. The contracts behind that capacity remain in place, the company said.

Nebius also gave an initial outlook for next year, guiding for revenue of $12 billion to $13 billion, compared with analyst projections of $12.09 billion.

The company said the forecast reflects a conservative approach to the pace of its buildout, and that it continues to expect to bring online more than 1 gigawatt of new capacity each year.

"Our focus remains on building a healthy, profitable business for the long term," Chief Executive Arkady Volozh said in a letter to shareholders.

The guidance comes amid investor worries over how neocloud companies will finance their growing footprints. CoreWeave, whose borrowing costs have surged in recent weeks and helped spark the market jitters, eased some of those concerns earlier this week after reporting better-than-expected quarterly revenue.

Volozh said Nebius is able to finance its buildout in a prudent way through customer prepayments and a healthy balance sheet, helped by a strategy that lets it command premium prices and terms, and bring down its costs of infrastructure from designing and building it itself.

Nebius expects prepayments and financing against existing contracts with investment-grade customers to cover 75% to 85% of its capital expenditures in 2027, and has a wide range of other funding options available, Volozh said.

"Our confidence in the fundamentals of what we are building has not changed, and the opportunity ahead of us is as large as it has ever been. We will keep going," Volozh said.

Nebius shares slid 12% to $136.66 in premarket trading.

Nebius reported a third-quarter loss of $37.5 million, or 13 cents a share, compared with a loss of $119.6 million, or 50 cents a share, a year earlier.

Revenue surged by more than six-fold to $980.8 million, compared with analyst estimates of $907.2 million.

Write to Kelly Cloonan at kelly.cloonan@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 12, 2026 08:38 ET (13:38 GMT)