On Monday, Dutch AI firm Nebius announced a massive $27 billion, five-year deal to supply advanced AI computing power to Meta in one of the largest single-customer contracts yet in the fast-growing “neocloud” sector.
Under the deal, Nebius will deliver $12 billion worth of high-performance computing power starting at the beginning of next year, spread across multiple undisclosed locations.
Meta has also committed to purchasing up to an additional $15 billion of capacity over the remainder of the five years, giving the social media giant unprecedented flexibility to scale its AI ambitions without shouldering the full burden of building and operating its own data centers.
The arrangement is a significant expansion of an existing partnership between the two companies and underscores a seismic shift in how the world’s biggest technology players are racing to secure the raw horsepower needed for generative AI, large language models, and next-generation applications.
Nebius, headquartered in Amsterdam, has emerged as a major player in the so-called “neocloud” space, a new breed of infrastructure providers that design and operate data centers purpose-built for artificial intelligence workloads.
Alongside competitors such as NScale and Coreweave, these firms are challenging traditional cloud giants by offering hyperscale, GPU-dense facilities optimized for the voracious power and cooling demands of modern AI training and inference.
For Meta and its peers, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, the model is increasingly attractive. By outsourcing the enormous capital expenditure, operational complexity, and financial risk of owning and running AI infrastructure, the tech giants can focus on what they do best: developing models, services, and user experiences while paying for computing power on a flexible, long-term contract basis.
Arkady Volozh, Nebius’s CEO and a veteran of the European tech scene, struck a confident tone in a statement accompanying the announcement. “We are pleased to expand our significant partnership with Meta as part of securing more large, long-term capacity contracts,” he said.
The deal comes at a pivotal moment. Global demand for AI infrastructure is exploding, with analysts forecasting hundreds of billions of dollars in new investment over the coming years as companies scramble to keep pace with rapid advances in machine learning.
Long-term, multi-billion-dollar commitments like this one provide infrastructure providers with the revenue certainty needed to fund the construction of ever-larger, ever-more-powerful data centers while giving hyperscalers such as Meta a predictable supply of the scarce GPU and liquid-cooling resources that are currently in critically short supply.
Industry watchers will now be watching closely to see whether this landmark transaction triggers a new wave of similar mega-deals across the neocloud sector. For Nebius, the Meta contract is not just a financial windfall; it is a powerful validation of its strategy to position itself as Europe’s answer to the AI infrastructure gold rush.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Dutch AI infrastructure firm Nebius has secured one of the largest deals in the emerging “neocloud” sector, a $27 billion, five-year agreement with Meta to supply massive AI computing capacity, starting with $12 billion from 2026 and up to $15 billion more thereafter.
This underscores how tech giants are increasingly outsourcing the ownership and risk of AI data centers to specialized providers in order to meet explosive demand faster and more flexibly.
