Nebius has signed a $3.5 billion loan facility with Citi to build more data centres and buy GPUs. The Amsterdam-based AI cloud company announced the deal on Thursday. The secured facility runs for 364 days.
Interest starts at the Term SOFR benchmark rate plus 2.75% a year. That margin can rise to 3.50%, subject to other adjustments. Nebius said it would use the money for data centre development, GPU purchases and general corporate purposes. Citi is the lead arranger on the Nebius loan.
“Sequencing our financing is how we optimize our long-term cost of capital,” said Ophir Nave, Nebius’s chief operating officer.
Nave said the facility covers the company’s near-term build-out. For the next phase, he said, Nebius can also borrow against its assets. That borrowing would be backed by more than $40 billion of long-term contracts from customers with investment-grade credit ratings. Nebius said its funding also includes customer prepayments and its own operating cash flow.
“Not carrying the kind of debt”
The deal comes as investors question how AI cloud providers, often called neoclouds, pay for their expansion. This month, the cost of insuring CoreWeave’s debt against default rose to levels usually seen as a sign of distress. Nebius shares have fallen sharply over the past month, CNBC reported.
Marc Boroditsky, Nebius’s chief revenue officer, told CNBC on Wednesday that Nebius was not in CoreWeave’s position.
“We’re not carrying the kind of debt that they are,” Boroditsky said.
He said prices for computing capacity were rising faster than Nebius expected. An auction it ran on Tuesday showed further increases, he said. If Nebius brought its 2027 capacity online, it would sell out, he said.
Nebius shares rose on Wednesday after SpaceX reported that revenue at its AI business grew ninefold. Boroditsky said SpaceX’s results showed that supply “continues to fall far behind demand”. Last week, Gartner warned that $3.5 trillion of AI infrastructure spending was at risk of future write-downs.
Public prices and a ‘dividend’
On Wednesday, at Nvidia’s GTC conference in Berlin, Nebius started publishing live prices for its spot GPUs. Spot capacity is preemptible, which means it can be interrupted. Nebius also sells capacity through short-term auctions and pay-as-you-go. It is testing a rebate for customers who hand back GPUs they are not using.
Nebius has data centre capacity in Finland, France, the UK, Spain, Estonia and Iceland. It also added $10 million in compute grants as its AI Builder Program expands across Europe. The same day, Nebius, Nvidia and the German robotics company Sereact announced a system for training robots. Its first use is the Sereact Zalando returns robots in some of CEVA Logistics’ warehouses.
Boroditsky also told CNBC that Nebius was “100% in principle” discussing investments in the communities around its sites. On Truth Social, President Donald Trump had urged data centre developers to offer local residents a “dividend”.
“The concept that the president identified… it’s not crazy to consider something like that,” Boroditsky said.