Nebius deployed Nvidia’s GPUs in its data center space.
Nebius believes it can achieve a $7 billion to $9 billion annual run rate by the end of this year.
If this strategy pans out, the stock is overpriced.
10 stocks we like better than Nebius Group
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA ) Artificial intelligence (AI) is the gold standard of investing. This has led to becoming the largest company in the world since 2023. However, other, more explosive AI stocks can provide outsized returns, and investors may want to consider them for smaller, riskier positions that can provide monster growth.
One that I’m excited about i don’t (NASDAQ: NBIS ). Nebius is growing at an incredible pace, and if it hits its growth projections by the end of the year, it could be a big winner for investors and outperform Nvidia by a lot.
If you’re looking to add a bit of rocket fuel to your portfolio, Nebius is a good place to look.
Nebius is not Nvidia’s competitor; This is a client. Nebius buys top-of-the-line Nvidia GPUs and places them in data centers that it owns and leases. It sets them up in computing clusters, allowing clients to hire them to perform various AI tasks. This is a business model similar to cloud computing, which has already proven itself to be a viable and widely profitable business model.
Nebius operates computing clusters in Europe and the US, although it was previously based in Russia. Nebius was spun out of Yandex, essentially the Russian Google, after sanctions from the Ukraine war made its non-Russian assets undesirable. After the spinoff, customers had no problem using Nebius’ computing infrastructure, and it is expecting phenomenal growth in 2026.
At the end of Q3, Nebius’ annual run rate is $551 million. That’s not too shabby, but it’s nothing compared to what the company believes will happen by the end of 2026. Management expects the annual run rate to be in the $7 billion to $9 billion range by the end of the year, which would represent monster growth. If Nabius achieves that growth, its stock will likely spike as a result.
Currently, Nebius trades for 65 times sales. However, this is a poor metric to use because we know that Nebius’ revenue is expected to explode throughout the year.
If we use forward sales, this reduces the stock valuation to 7.1 times sales, not a bad price to pay for a cloud computing company. If you go to 2027 times sales, it drops to just 3.2 times sales.
These are estimates, and there is no guarantee that Nabius will actually hit them. However, one thing that likely won’t change is the demand for its computing infrastructure. We’re nowhere near the amount of computing power that AI hyperscalers want, and growth is expected to continue through 2030.
If Nebius continues to meet growth expectations, I have no doubt that the stock will be a big winner in 2026 and beyond, crushing Nvidia. But there is one thing to note.
Nebius is in a growth-at-all-costs stage. It sees a large market, and is looking to capture it when there is a demand. As a result, it’s throwing profits to the wind to build an on-demand AI computing infrastructure.
It could pay off big time for Nebius and its shareholders, or it could bring down the company. Nebius has borrowed a lot of money to finance its future, but it is not generating any profits to pay off the debt now.
That can all flip once the company has built the computing capacity it wants and is getting big annual cash flows from its computing systems. Time will tell if this ends up being a tactic, but if it works, Nebius will outperform Nvidia’s stock along with the broader market. If something goes wrong with its strategy, Nebius stock could be in trouble. This is a high-risk, high-reward play, and investors should position their portfolio sizing accordingly.
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Keithen Drury has a position at Nvidia. The Motley Fool has posts and recommends Nvidia. Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
This genius AI stock is more likely than Nvidia in 2026 was originally published by Motley Fool.
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