- Neocloud player Nebius is gaining steam, recently inking a multi-billion dollar deal with Microsoft
- Its CRO told Fierce it thinks customer diversification will help insulate it should the AI bubble burst
- The company is also seeing growing interest from telcos, who are looking for an independent cloud partner
Whether you believe there’s an AI bubble or not, it’s certainly a hot topic of conversation. And with a significant number of neocloud companies popping up to ride the AI wave, it’s worth asking what might happen to them if it suddenly disappears.
So Fierce took the question straight to Nebius, an up-and-coming player in the neocloud market.
Founded by the CEO and co-founder of Yandex (basically, Russia’s Google), the company reported $156 million in revenue in the first half of 2025 and just inked a massive five-year $17.4 billion AI infrastructure supply contract with Microsoft in September. All this is to say the company has a lot to lose if the AI boom goes bust.
We caught up with Nebius Chief Revenue Officer Marc Boroditsky at Nvidia’s GTC event this week and asked: Are you worried about the AI bubble bursting and hyperscalers pulling back on contracted expansions? What kind of contingency plans do you have?
Boroditsky’s response was one of relative unconcern. Customer diversification, he said, will help insulate it from shifts in the hyperscale market.
He explained that the Microsoft deal was about Nebius’ ability to fill a specific need the cloud giant had. “We’re not going to miss out on an opportunity like that,” he said, not just because of the revenue but because of what Microsoft’s trust and endorsement communicates to other potential customers.
“It helps us step up to the next level in the market,” he added.
Indeed, Nebius has already outlined plans to deploy an additional gigawatt of compute capacity in 2026, and Boroditsky hinted it has ambitions to go even further to accommodate growing demand for AI compute.
But even if hyperscalers like Microsoft pull back, Boroditsky said Nebius will be in good shape. He noted its compute client base is “very diverse” and includes everything from individual developers and startups on up to larger enterprises and software suppliers like Cloudflare and Shopify.
“Enterprises haven’t even started [with AI]. It’s actually very, very early innings,” he said. Boroditsky added Nebius is increasingly popular among software companies who don’t necessarily want to run their cloud workloads with hyperscale suppliers that have the potential to also be competitors.
Telecom traction
Telecoms are another cohort that have expressed a growing interest in Nebius, especially European operators. Boroditsky said telecoms are looking for a partner with GPU expertise and a focus on custom deployments.
Some are looking to use Nebius’ compute muscle for internal use cases, some are looking to use it for new product development and others are exploring “potential joint opportunities in the market.”
“We may be channels for one another,” he said.
Asked if he could name any names, Boroditsky said not yet but he expects some deal announcements will be forthcoming soon.
Who is Nebius?
Nebius’ AI infrastructure business is just one part of the company, which also includes an autonomous vehicle and robotics arm (Avride) and edtech platform (Tripleten). It also has equity stakes in a number of external companies such as Toloka and ClickHouse. The whole package is known as Nebius Group.
The aforementioned Yandex business actually used to be part of the group and the broader company was called Yandex N.V. The company sold off its Yandex assets for $5.4 billion in 2024 and the company rebranded as Nebius Group. It now operates out of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Given the fact the it will be a supplier for Microsoft – which handles sensitive workloads for major corporations and governments around the world – and a likely player in the sovereign cloud arena, we asked Boroditsky if Nebius’ history (and that of CEO Arkady Volozh) has ever come up as a client concern.
He said it did in the early days of the company, but in his five-month tenure there he hasn’t yet seen it come up. Boroditsky also pointed to the fact that Microsoft would have done some serious due diligence before signing with Nebius as a reassuring factor.
Microsoft notably suspended new sales in Russia following the country’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and subsequently wound down operations there in the years that followed. It fully exited the market in 2025.