Meta will pay up to $27 billion over the next five years to gain access to cloud provider Nebius’ artificial intelligence infrastructure, in a spending offensive to compete with the industry’s most advanced frontier models.
To Nebius, a call neocloud which operates data centers and maintains a strategic partnership with Nvidia, will provide Meta with US$12 billion in dedicated capacity from the beginning of 2027, the Dutch company said in a statement this Monday (16). Meta has also committed to purchasing up to $15 billion in additional capacity that the provider is building for third-party customers.
The disbursement represents one of the largest individual contracts ever signed by Meta and reinforces the search by the owner of Instagram and Facebook for more computing capacity to boost the development of AI products. Last year, the company had already closed a separate US$3 billion deal with Nebius.
Nebius shares rose 15% in premarket trading. The shares had closed at US$112.95 in New York on Friday (13) and have almost quadrupled in the last 12 months. Meta advanced 2.8% before the open, after closing the previous session at US$613.71.
Meta and some of its biggest technology peers are expected to spend around $650 billion in 2026 to build data centers and buy other types of infrastructure in anticipation of an explosion of AI services in the coming years. Meta has made AI the company’s top priority and has been investing heavily to compete with rivals like OpenAI and Google. Since the beginning of the year, it has also closed multi-billion dollar partnership deals with Nvidia and AMD for AI infrastructure. And it is developing its own chips in-house.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said last year that Meta will invest US$600 billion in infrastructure projects in the US by 2028. To achieve this, the company has relied on profits generated by its advertising business, but has also turned to external financing to fund these projects. Meta is developing its own high-performance models and has already built several AI products, including a chatbot available within its various applications.
Continues after advertising
A Meta spokesperson confirmed the agreement with Nebius and stated that the strategy of diversifying partnerships and the technological stack in AI is part of “building a more resilient and flexible infrastructure”.
Nebius, based in Amsterdam and spun off from Russian internet giant Yandex in 2024, is one of the few startups to capitalize on the AI boom by building bespoke data centers to train models and operate services like ChatGPT.
Nvidia has been using its gigantic resources to finance this new generation of neocloudswhich compete with large cloud computing providers like Google and Amazon. Last week, Nvidia announced that it will invest US$2 billion in Nebius, driving a 16% rise in the Dutch company’s shares.
Continues after advertising
Much of Nvidia’s funding wave has gone to companies that buy its chips, leading to criticism that this investment cycle is fueling a bubble. In January, Nvidia announced a similar $2 billion investment in Nebius competitor CoreWeave to implement its products. The company also invested US$30 billion in OpenAI this year and participated in a US$2 billion fundraising round from British neocloud Nscale.
© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.
