Nebius: $33.6 Billion in Orders and a Yard Still Under Construction

On Friday, July 24, Nebius (NBIS) traded as high as $224.50 and closed at $187.77. The 15.0% decline arrived without a company announcement, an earnings warning, a lost customer, or a downgrade. Coverage of the session converged on one explanation, a broad rotation out of high multiple AI infrastructure. Nebius carries the highest multiple in that group, and it gave back more than any of its listed peers that day.

Sitting inside the company's first quarter filing is a number that rarely makes the coverage. Remaining performance obligations, the accounting term for contracted revenue a company has signed but has not yet delivered, stood at $33.585 billion as of March 31. Press coverage prefers the looser figure of roughly $46 billion in announced deal value across the two hyperscaler agreements. Only one of those is calculated to an accounting standard and disclosed in a filing, and that's the one worth anchoring on.

Nebius right now resembles a shipyard with a full order book and a yard that is still being poured. The contracts are signed, the progress payments have cleared the bank, and the first hulls in the water are earning good money. The berths that will build the overwhelming majority of that order book have not been finished, and in several cases have not been started.

That gap between the book and the yard is the entire investment question. It's also why the stock can fall 15% in an afternoon on no news at all.

What the order book actually contains

The two anchor contracts are large and specific. Microsoft (MSFT) signed a five year agreement worth approximately $17.4 billion, with options that could carry it toward $19.4 billion. Meta (META) expanded an existing relationship in March into $12 billion of dedicated capacity beginning in early 2027, plus a commitment to purchase up to an additional $15 billion of capacity across upcoming clusters, bringing the headline value to roughly $27 billion.