Nebius signs 50MW, 12-year capacity deal with AIB Data Centers

Nebius has signed a 50MW data center capacity agreement with AIB Data Centers at a site in the southeastern United States on an initial 12-year term with two five-year renewal options, according to Data Center Dynamics, and AIB says the lease sits on a 65MW electric service agreement that predates it. Under the contract, Nebius will make prepayments to AIB — money that, together with project-level debt and equity, is to support the facility's development costs.

Two data halls are being built for the tenant, the first expected within 10 months and the second within 14. AIB says the site's pre-existing 65MW electric service agreement puts the leased capacity inside power the developer had already secured; the coverage does not say how the 50MW divides between the halls or what becomes of the rest of the 65MW.

Jerry Tang, AIB's chief executive, describes the company's approach as securing power in attractive markets and converting it into long-term contracted revenue with leading AI infrastructure companies. He calls the Nebius signing a transformational milestone, says the company sees a capital-efficient path to develop the initial capacity, and adds that its focus now turns to execution and delivering on schedule.

Andrey Korolenko, Nebius's chief product and infrastructure officer, calls time-to-power the binding constraint on AI infrastructure today and says AIB's existing power position gave the company a clear path to bringing capacity online on a timeline that works for its customers. The 50MW is dedicated to training and inference workloads.

AIB was previously BlockchAIn Digital Infrastructure, a developer oriented to blockchain, AI and HPC workloads, and in April 2026 it laid out a planned US pipeline of around 715MW across South Carolina, Minnesota and Texas. It already operates a 40MW data center in South Carolina, 20MW of it slated to transition to AI workloads, while a separate 100MW pipeline site in Florence County is planned for AI GPU hosting in the second quarter of 2028. Earlier this month, the company acquired two adjacent parcels in Texas totaling 29.4 acres, adding 55MW of power capacity, 15MW of it energized.

The Nebius site's location has not been provided, though Data Center Dynamics identifies it from an investor presentation as CLT1 in South Carolina. The coverage puts no dollar value, rent or prepayment figure on the contract, leaving its economics and any comparison with other AI capacity leases unstated.

The agreement follows the financing PID reported in August, when Nebius moved to turn Nvidia's stake into $5.75 billion of debt, a transaction whose four-point coupon spread priced the near-term GPU buildout as infrastructure and the long haul as a risk asset. A 12-year lease with two five-year options is the revenue side of that trade, fixing a term against a capital-intensive build and resting on a counterparty whose credit is what the twelve years actually depend on.

Prepayments are the part of the structure that changes who funds what. Tenant cash arriving before delivery should reduce the project debt and equity AIB has to raise against the initial capacity — the capital efficiency Tang points to — while giving Nebius a claim on a build that only has value if the halls arrive on the stated schedule. Power already in hand is what makes that arrangement bankable; a site still waiting on an interconnection would be a harder underwrite, whatever the tenant's credit.

How the lease gets priced depends on which category the tenant falls into: named hyperscaler tenancy gets treated as utility-like cash flow, while everyone else carries merchant risk until a contract is signed. A 12-year commitment should push AIB toward the first category, but the counterparty is a neocloud whose own buildout is debt-financed, so the classification is not clean.

A renewal option is not a commitment. With both extensions exercised, the arrangement would run as long as 22 years, but the coverage does not state the rent, the conditions or the notice mechanics attached to them, which leaves the second decade a stated possibility rather than a priced one.

AIB's Texas purchase sits in a market where the rules for new capacity are being rewritten: the state's data center permits were frozen in August pending a December audit, a squeeze this publication described as folding community and ratepayer support into the same diligence binder as the interconnection agreement. What AIB intends to build on the 29.4 acres is not stated.

The Nebius lease runs the other way: its 50MW comes attached to a 65MW service agreement that was already in place, with the power question answered before the tenancy question was asked. Two deadlines now carry the deal — the first hall at 10 months, the second at 14 — which is when prepayments begin converting into delivered capacity. How the rest of AIB's 715MW pipeline clears the same power and permitting tests is the open item.