Nebius signs $12B in Q3 contracts covering all build costs

Nebius signed $12 billion of customer contracts in the third quarter that covered 100% of the capex needed to serve them, up from 50-60% in the second quarter. Chief executive Arkady Volozh disclosed the figures on the third-quarter earnings call, as Data Center Dynamics reported.

The company raised prepayments on contracts signed in the quarter so data center costs, hardware and networking equipment are paid upfront by the customer. Payback shortened to one year and seven months from one year and ten months a quarter earlier, three months faster. "Our customers are paying more, they pay earlier, and they are committing for longer, and we are getting our capital back faster," Volozh said.

For allocators underwriting data center and compute assets, the prepayment ratio decides who carries construction risk: the higher the share funded by the tenant upfront, the smaller the developer's draw on debt and equity. Nebius expects full-year prepayments to total $10 billion.

The contract book also supports borrowing. Chief financial officer Maria del Dado Alonso Sanchez said the asset-backed financing framework built on long-term customer agreements lets Nebius "tap into such facilities" as the $775 million facility it signed in July. Commitment revenue of that kind is more than $40 billion, she said, and the framework is repeatable. "If the terms in the capital market are not attractive, we can allocate more capacity to the long-term contracts," she said.

Group revenue was $980.8 million, up 571% from a year earlier and 68% from the second quarter. AI cloud revenue of $973.8 million rose 643% and was about 99% of the total. Nebius guided to full-year revenue of $3 billion to $3.2 billion, and the quarterly net loss narrowed to $37.5 million from $119.6 million a year earlier.

Nebius expects annual recurring revenue to exceed $7 billion by February and will stop reporting the metric, the CFO said. Nebius expects to be pretax profitable in the fourth quarter of 2027.