The five-year agreement expands an existing relationship between the two companies and will involve one of the first large-scale deployments of Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin chips. Nebius shares surged 14% in pre-market trading.
Meta has entered a significant long-term AI infrastructure deal with Dutch neocloud operator Nebius Group worth up to $27 billion over five years, marking a major AI compute agreement.
Announced on March 16, 2026, the deal significantly enhances the existing commercial relationship between the companies. This comes just five days after Nvidia’s $2 billion strategic investment in Nebius was revealed as part of a different partnership.
The agreement is split into two segments. Initially, Nebius will offer $12 billion in dedicated compute capacity across several locations from early 2027.
This infrastructure will utilize what Nebius calls one of the first large-scale deployments of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, featuring the latest AI-specialist accelerators.
The second segment requires Meta to purchase additional capacity from upcoming Nebius clusters, up to $15 billion over five years. Nebius plans to initially offer this capacity to third-party customers, with any remaining capacity provided to Meta.
“We are pleased to expand our significant partnership with Meta as part of securing more large, long-term capacity contracts to accelerate the build-out and growth of our core AI cloud business. We will continue to deliver,” said Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO, Nebius.
Nebius shares rose by 14% in pre-market trading following the news. The company maintained its 2026 financial guidance, stating that capacity delivery from this agreement begins in early 2027, so the financial impact will be beyond the current fiscal year.
Expanding an existing relationship
Meta and Nebius have a history of collaboration. In November 2025, Meta signed an initial $3 billion five-year agreement with Nebius, disclosed by Volozh during the company’s third-quarter earnings report. Today’s announcement marks a ninefold increase in that commitment, elevating the total value of Meta’s contracted spending with Nebius to $30 billion.
Meta has prioritized AI as a key strategic focus and plans to allocate up to $135 billion for AI projects in 2026, funded mainly by advertising profits. Mark Zuckerberg also announced plans for a $600 billion investment in US infrastructure by 2028.
The increasing AI expenditure among major tech companies highlights the importance of firms like Nebius, which offer specialized, large-scale compute capacity without the extensive overhead of a full hyperscaler. Collectively, major tech companies are expected to invest approximately $650 billion in data center and AI equipment in 2026.
Nebius, listed on Nasdaq and headquartered in Amsterdam, was born from Yandex NV, dubbed the Google of Russia. Volozh sold Yandex’s Russian assets to a Kremlin-linked consortium for around $2.4 billion in July 2024, retaining the cloud and data center operations outside Russia under the Nebius name.
Trading on Nasdaq, suspended since February 2022 due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, resumed in October 2024.
Volozh, who co-founded Yandex in the 1990s and led it for over two decades, was placed on EU sanctions in 2022 but was