Nebius Q3 2026 Earnings: Revenue Soars 571% to $980.8 Million

Nebius Group N.V. (NASDAQ: NBIS) reported third-quarter 2026 revenue of $980.8 million on November 12, up 571% from $146.1 million in the same quarter last year, and posted its first adjusted-profitable quarter since going public. Adjusted EBITDA swung to a $465.8 million profit from a $5.2 million loss a year earlier, while GAAP net loss narrowed to $37.5 million from $119.6 million.

What Nebius does

Nebius describes itself as "the AI cloud company." Its core business designs, builds and operates GPU data centers and sells the compute, cloud software and managed AI services that run on top of them to startups, AI labs and enterprises. Nebius Group also consolidates two other operating businesses — Avride, which develops autonomous vehicles and delivery robots, and TripleTen, an edtech platform that trains people for tech careers — and holds non-consolidated equity stakes in the database company ClickHouse and the AI data-labeling platform Toloka. Nebius is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NBIS and has posted accelerating revenue growth every quarter this year as it has signed large, multi-year compute contracts with AI labs and enterprises.

Revenue jumped 571% as AI cloud demand surged

Nebius said revenue for the three months ended September 30, 2026 came in at $980.8 million, compared with $146.1 million in the third quarter of 2025 — a 571% year-over-year increase. For the first nine months of 2026, revenue reached $1,962.1 million, up 549% from $302.1 million in the same period last year.

Adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net income both turned positive

The quarter marked a profitability turning point on Nebius's preferred metrics. Adjusted EBITDA — net income from continuing operations before items such as depreciation, stock-based compensation and interest — came in at $465.8 million, a swing from a $5.2 million loss in the third quarter of 2025. For the first nine months of 2026, adjusted EBITDA totaled $831.5 million, up from a $79.9 million loss a year earlier.

Adjusted net income, which strips out stock-based compensation, foreign-exchange effects and a few other items, was $90.9 million in the quarter, compared with a $100.4 million loss in Q3 2025. Nebius said this was its first adjusted-profitable quarter. On a nine-month basis, the adjusted net loss narrowed 84% to $42.6 million from $273.7 million.

On a GAAP basis, Nebius still posted a net loss of $37.5 million for the quarter — an improvement of 69% from the $119.6 million loss in Q3 2025 — as depreciation, interest expense and other non-cash items continued to weigh on the bottom line. Basic and diluted net loss per share was $0.13, versus $0.50 a year earlier. For the nine months, net income from continuing operations was $393.3 million, up 41% from $278.6 million in the same period of 2025.

Costs are shrinking as a share of revenue

Nebius's operating costs grew in dollar terms but fell sharply as a percentage of revenue, a sign of operating leverage as the business scales. Cost of revenue was $219.7 million in Q3 2026 (22% of revenue), down from 29% of a much smaller revenue base in Q3 2025. Product development spending was $118.6 million (12% of revenue), down from 31%. Sales, general and administrative costs were $237.4 million (24% of revenue), down from 61%. Depreciation and amortization, which is rising as Nebius brings more data center capacity online, was $354.7 million (36% of revenue), down from 68% a year earlier even as the dollar amount more than tripled. In total, operating costs and expenses fell to 95% of revenue from 189% in the year-ago quarter — the clearest sign in the report that Nebius is gaining scale economics as it grows, even as it keeps adding GPU capacity and headcount to meet demand from new and existing customers.

Capex hit $7.3 billion for the quarter as the AI buildout accelerates

Nebius spent $7.3 billion on property, equipment and intangible assets in the third quarter alone, up from $955.5 million in the same quarter of 2025 — a 664% increase. Over the first nine months of 2026, capex totaled $15.4 billion, compared with $2.0 billion a year earlier.

That buildout shows up across the balance sheet. Total assets grew to $38.7 billion as of September 30, 2026, from $12.4 billion at the end of 2025, while total liabilities rose to $26.4 billion from $7.8 billion over the same period, reflecting new debt and lease obligations tied to data center capacity. Total shareholders' equity rose to $12.3 billion from $4.6 billion, helped by additional paid-in capital from share and convertible-note issuances. Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash stood at $8.6 billion at quarter-end, up from $4.9 billion a year earlier. Total shares outstanding as of September 30, 2026 were 292,902,405, made up of 259,597,352 Class A shares and 33,305,053 Class B shares, excluding 29,138,539 Class A shares held in treasury.

Where Nebius is building capacity

In his letter to shareholders, CEO Arkady Volozh said Nebius prefers to build and own its own data center sites rather than lease capacity from third parties, giving it "greater control over execution and better economics." The shareholder letter's capacity overview lists sites across Iceland, Finland, Estonia, the UK, France, Spain and Israel, alongside a growing U.S. and Canadian footprint spanning New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, the Kansas City area and Alberta. Volozh said owned sites are "on time or ahead of schedule," while some third-party capacity has faced delays — including in New Jersey, where Nebius is transitioning a site's power source to Bloom Energy fuel cells after initial generation was installed.

What CEO Arkady Volozh said about deal terms

Volozh said the quarter showed "the strength of the business we are building," adding that "demand remains exceptionally strong, and we have the right mechanisms in place to capture it." He pointed to improving deal economics as a highlight: "Prepayments on Q3 agreements covered more than 100% of the associated capex, including data center construction and networking, up from 50-60% in Q2," he wrote, adding that the average payback term improved to one year and seven months, from one year and ten months in the second quarter, "driven by higher contracted prices." He also said Token Factory, Nebius's managed inference platform, is "approaching a multi-hundred-million-dollar run rate, with contract value growing 17x quarter-on-quarter in Q3."

How Nebius plans to pay for its buildout

Volozh addressed investor questions about how the broader AI infrastructure buildout will be financed: "Our focus remains on building a healthy, profitable business for the long term," he wrote, adding that this approach allows Nebius to "command premium prices and terms, combined with lower costs of our infrastructure as a result of designing and building it ourselves, which in turn results in higher margins." Nebius said it expects prepayments and financing against existing contracts with investment-grade customers to cover 75%-85% of its 2027 capex, backed by "a low cost of debt and a healthy balance sheet, which includes cash and our strategic equity stakes." The company said it will "remain opportunistic" about raising additional external capital when it is cost-effective to do so.

Nebius narrows its 2026 guidance, outlines a 2027 breakeven target

Alongside the results, Nebius updated its outlook. "With a portion of this year's revenue moving into the first part of next year, we now expect 2026 revenue at the low end of our $3.0-3.4 billion range, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of ca. 40%," Volozh wrote. The company also said it now expects the annualized run-rate revenue (ARR) figure it had guided to for December 2026 to arrive in February 2027 instead, "even before New Jersey ramps up to full capacity."

For 2027, Nebius gave an initial outlook for the first time: it expects to reach pre-tax breakeven by the end of the year, anticipates capital expenditure of $40-45 billion, and continues to expect to bring more than 1 gigawatt of new data center capacity online each year. Starting in 2027, the company said it will shift its primary guidance metrics from revenue and adjusted EBITDA to revenue and pre-tax earnings, "as the business matures."

Avride, TripleTen and Nebius's equity stakes

Beyond the core AI cloud business, Nebius Group consolidates Avride and TripleTen in its financial results, and holds non-consolidated equity stakes in ClickHouse and Toloka. Nebius deconsolidated Toloka's results in mid-2025 after a third-party investment transaction reduced Nebius's voting control, and now reports that stake using the equity method rather than including Toloka's revenue in its own.

Why Nebius's adjusted numbers differ from its GAAP results

Nebius reports two sets of profitability figures because its GAAP results are weighed down by large non-cash and financing-related items tied to its rapid buildout. Adjusted EBITDA adds back depreciation and amortization, stock-based compensation, interest income and expense, and tax, among other items. Adjusted net income makes a narrower set of adjustments — mainly stock-based compensation, foreign-exchange swings and debt-issuance costs — while still counting depreciation and interest against the result. Nebius says it uses these non-GAAP measures internally to track the underlying performance of the business, separate from accounting charges tied to financing a fast-growing, capital-intensive data center footprint; it cautions investors not to treat them as a substitute for GAAP figures.

Why this earnings season matters for AI infrastructure

Nebius's results land in the middle of a broader stretch of AI-infrastructure news this quarter, as investors weigh how fast GPU cloud providers can turn massive capex commitments into profit. Pandromeda has also covered Anthropic's IPO pricing, AMD's EPYC chips powering Google Cloud's confidential TPU instances, and Nvidia's sovereign-AI partnership with Rebellions and SK Telecom — all part of the same capital-intensive race to build out AI compute that Nebius's own capex and financing disclosures reflect.

What's next for Nebius

Nebius held its Q3 2026 earnings webcast on November 12 at 8 a.m. Eastern Time, with a replay posted afterward on its investor relations site. The company's next scheduled update will be its fourth-quarter and full-year 2026 results, typically reported in February. Investors will be watching whether the ARR figure pushed from December 2026 into February 2027 materializes as guided, whether the improved prepayment coverage on new contracts continues into the fourth quarter, and how the newly disclosed 2027 targets — pre-tax breakeven and $40-45 billion of capex — hold up as the buildout continues.

Written byTheo Park

Theo Park runs the AI desk at Pandromeda. He follows model launches from the frontier labs and the open-weight community, tracks the assistants and developer tools built on them, and explains what each release changes on pricing, capability and safety. His reporting leans on primary sources: model cards, technical reports, API documentation and the companies' own announcements.

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