New York, February 19, 2026, 15:29 (EST) — Regular session
- Nebius shares up about 4.6% in afternoon trading, outperforming a weaker tech tape
- Compass Point initiates coverage at Buy with a $150 price target; BWS reiterates Buy
- Focus shifts to capacity buildout, spending pace, and the timing of the Tavily deal close
Nebius Group N.V. (NBIS) shares rose about 4.6% to $106.44 on Thursday, after touching $99.56 earlier in the session, following fresh bullish research on the AI infrastructure firm. The move came as the Nasdaq 100 tracker QQQ fell about 0.7%, with Nvidia and Microsoft also lower.
The initiation matters now because investors have been quick to chase — and fade — specialist providers of GPU computing as the cost of building AI capacity keeps rising. A new research line can widen the buyer base, but it can also sharpen the debate over what the business is really worth once the spending bill hits.
Compass Point analyst Michael Donovan initiated coverage with a Buy rating and a $150 price target, calling Nebius a full-stack AI infrastructure company selling GPU compute and related software through an AI cloud platform, TheFly reported. BWS Financial maintained a Buy rating and kept a $130 target on Tuesday, according to Benzinga’s analyst ratings feed. (TipRanks)
Nebius last week reported fourth-quarter revenue of $227.7 million, up from $35.2 million a year earlier, and posted adjusted EBITDA of $15.0 million, compared with a loss the prior year. Purchases of property and equipment reached $4.07 billion in 2025, underscoring how hard the company is leaning into data center capacity. (Nebius)
In a shareholder letter, founder and CEO Arkady Volozh said the company ended 2025 with $3.7 billion of cash and $1.25 billion of annualized run-rate revenue — a metric it calculates by taking revenue from the last month of the quarter and multiplying 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 wrote, while pointing to a target of $7 billion to $9 billion in ARR by the end of 2026. (Nebius)
Nebius has pushed into the “neocloud” label — smaller, specialist providers selling compute capacity alongside the big cloud platforms — and has landed large hyperscaler contracts. It said in November it signed a roughly $3 billion, five-year deal with Meta, its second hyperscaler contract after a $17.4 billion agreement with Microsoft in September. (Reuters)
The company is also trying to deepen its software stack. Nebius said on Feb. 10 it agreed to acquire Tavily, an “agentic search” provider — tools that help AI agents query the web in real time — and Roman Chernin, its co-founder and chief business officer, said: “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.” A U.S. filing said the transaction value was not disclosed, the upfront payment would be in cash and the deal includes performance-based additional consideration.
But the downside case is familiar for data-center heavy models: power, hardware and funding can all become chokepoints. In its annual report, Nebius warned that limits on reliable, cost-effective power and connectivity could constrain growth plans, and said it expected to need additional equity or debt financing to support expansion. (SEC)
What traders watch next is whether Nebius updates investors on the timing of the Tavily close and on new capacity and customer delivery milestones. Another near-term signpost is Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose on March 16–19, where Nebius is listed as an elite sponsor. (Nebius)
