Nebius: sold out and prepaid, but the build has to earn its keep

Nebius, the AI cloud that grew out of Yandex, is sold out. Revenue in the second quarter of 2026 was $582M, up 454%, with an adjusted EBITDA margin around 40%, and it raised its on-demand GPU prices twice this year. It differs from CoreWeave in how the build is paid for: customers had prepaid $6.0B by the end of June, cash of $8.0B roughly matched debt of $8.5B, mostly convertibles, and its large contracts are with investment-grade buyers, Microsoft and Meta among them. What stops this from being a call yet is the scale of the spending. Nebius guides $20–25B of capex for 2026 against revenue of about $3B, which is a bet that the capacity it is building will fill and keep its price. One customer was 83% of receivables at the end of 2025, and its auditor gave an adverse opinion on internal controls, with two material weaknesses. Rising GPU rents show tight supply today; they also invite the supply that would bring them down. We are WATCHING. The test is whether the megawatts it is building turn into revenue on the schedule it has set, starting with the 12 November results. WATCHING, conviction MEDIUM, one year. This view was formed by MenFem's research process at Connor's request and adopted by him.