Key Highlights
- Nebius Group shares surged up to 9%, reaching $248.90 during Thursday’s trading session.
- BNP Paribas elevated its rating to Outperform from Neutral, increasing the price target from $260 to $399.
- Analysts cite strong pricing dynamics and limited AI compute availability as primary growth catalysts.
- JPMorgan similarly upgraded CoreWeave for comparable reasons, though its shares posted more modest gains.
- Year-to-date performance shows Nebius up 193%, significantly outperforming market benchmarks.
Nebius Group experienced substantial momentum Thursday. Shares of the AI infrastructure provider jumped as high as 9% during the session, touching $248.90, after opening with a 6.4% advance to $241.20.
The surge followed an optimistic assessment from BNP Paribas Exane. Covering analyst Daniel Wang elevated his stance on Nebius to Outperform from Neutral while simultaneously boosting his price objective to $399 from the previous $260 target.
This revised target suggests substantial appreciation potential from pre-rally levels. The move also positions BNP Paribas among the more optimistic firms tracking the company on Wall Street.
Drivers behind increased analyst optimism
The rating improvement comes after several company announcements that have reinforced the investment thesis. Earlier in September, Nebius informed its client base of upcoming price adjustments for on-demand GPU cloud offerings, effective October 1.
Pricing for Nvidia H100, H200, B200, and B300 instances will increase between 17% and 21%. Meanwhile, AMD EPYC Genoa CPU pricing faces approximately 25% increases.
Market participants interpret these adjustments as evidence of constrained AI computing availability rather than operational necessity. This marks the second pricing elevation within a matter of months.
Nebius delivered Q2 AI cloud revenue totaling $574.9 million, accompanied by an adjusted EBITDA margin approaching 50%. These metrics provide substantial support for the pricing narrative.
Bank of America analyst Tal Liani maintained his Buy recommendation on Nebius Thursday, holding a $310 price objective. He emphasized the company’s strategic balance between extended hyperscaler agreements and shorter-duration, premium-priced arrangements.
Liani noted that Nebius is allocating certain capacity toward one- to three-year contracts priced at approximately twice hyperscaler rates. He suggested this strategy could elevate revenue per watt significantly beyond current analyst projections.
Additionally, Nebius maintains two substantial agreements with Meta Platforms and Microsoft scheduled to conclude in early 2025. Wang characterized these contracts as indicators of future business opportunities.
“We expect incremental capacity from Q2 onwards to increasingly reflect higher priced AI cloud contracts,” Wang wrote in his note.
Nebius performance versus CoreWeave
Nebius wasn’t the only AI infrastructure provider receiving favorable analyst attention Thursday. JPMorgan’s Samik Chatterjee upgraded CoreWeave to Overweight from Neutral, lifting his price target from $120 to $125.
CoreWeave shares advanced as well, though the 4% gain to $90.14 was more moderate. Nebius has delivered 193% returns year-to-date, while CoreWeave has posted 25% gains during the identical period.
Chatterjee referenced the same underlying factor fueling the Nebius upgrade: escalating AI compute pricing. Northland Equity Capital Markets data indicates hourly compute rental costs have climbed roughly 33% since December.
Broader equity markets couldn’t account for the movement. The Nasdaq declined 0.5%, the S&P 500 dropped 0.4%, and the Dow fell 0.4% during the session, confirming that Nebius’s rally stemmed purely from stock-specific developments.
Despite Thursday’s advance, Nebius trades substantially below its 52-week peak of $299.86. The company’s current market capitalization stands at approximately $64.19 billion, with typical daily trading volume around 20.4 million shares.
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