New York, February 19, 2026, 15:29 (EST) — Regular session
- Nebius climbed roughly 4.6% in the afternoon session, bucking a softer tech sector.
- Compass Point started coverage with a Buy rating and set a $150 price target. BWS is sticking with its Buy call.
- Attention now turns to how quickly capacity ramps up, the rate of spending, and when the Tavily deal will finally close.
Nebius Group N.V. (NBIS) climbed roughly 4.6% to finish at $106.44 on Thursday. Shares dipped to $99.56 earlier before rebounding, pushed higher by new upbeat research on the AI infrastructure name. Over on the Nasdaq 100, the QQQ dropped around 0.7%, while Nvidia and Microsoft slipped as well.
That initiation hits at a moment when investors aren’t hesitating to pile into, then pull back from, GPU computing specialists, as AI build-out costs just keep climbing. A fresh research angle could pull in more buyers. But it’s also likely to intensify questions about the company’s true value when those heavy spending numbers land.
Michael Donovan at Compass Point kicked off coverage on Nebius with a Buy and set a $150 target, describing the company as a full-stack AI infrastructure play that offers GPU compute and software via its AI cloud platform, TheFly said. BWS Financial stuck to its Buy call and left its $130 price target unchanged on Tuesday, Benzinga’s analyst ratings feed showed. 1
Nebius logged fourth-quarter revenue of $227.7 million last week, a sharp jump from $35.2 million a year ago, with adjusted EBITDA swinging to $15.0 million from a loss. Property and equipment purchases hit $4.07 billion in 2025, highlighting the company’s push to ramp up data center capacity. 2
Founder and CEO Arkady Volozh told shareholders the company wrapped up 2025 holding $3.7 billion in cash, with annualized run-rate revenue at $1.25 billion — that figure comes from multiplying the last month’s revenue of the quarter by 12. “We enter 2026 with strong momentum, high operational confidence, and a scalable platform built for the world’s most demanding AI workloads,” Volozh said. He’s aiming for ARR to jump to somewhere between $7 billion and $9 billion by year-end 2026. 3
Nebius, now branding itself under the “neocloud” banner — that’s the cluster of smaller, more specialized cloud vendors — has managed to snag some big hyperscaler deals. In November, the company announced a five-year contract with Meta worth around $3 billion, marking its second win in this arena following a $17.4 billion agreement with Microsoft in September. 4
Nebius is pushing further into software. On Feb. 10, the company said it struck a deal to buy Tavily, which offers “agentic search” — tech that lets AI agents pull in live web data. “We’re not just an infrastructure-as-a-service company — we’re building the complete platform for anyone who wants to build AI products, agents, or services,” co-founder and chief business officer Roman Chernin told reporters. The price wasn’t disclosed in a U.S. filing, but it’s a cash upfront deal, with potential extra payouts tied to Tavily’s future performance.
But there’s a well-known risk for models that lean on data centers: power, hardware, and capital can all hit their limits. Nebius, in its annual report, flagged concerns that access to steady, affordable power and robust connectivity might hold back growth. The company also signaled it will likely need to tap new equity or debt to fund its buildout. 5
Traders now have their eye on Nebius for any fresh details about when the Tavily deal might close, plus updates on new capacity or customer delivery targets. Another marker: Nvidia’s GTC conference, set for March 16–19 in San Jose, where Nebius appears as an elite sponsor. 6
