TLDR
- Nebius Group stock climbed as much as 9% to $248.90 on Thursday.
- BNP Paribas upgraded the stock to Outperform from Neutral and raised its price target to $399 from $260.
- The upgrade points to Nebius’s pricing power and tight AI compute capacity as key drivers.
- CoreWeave also got an upgrade from JPMorgan for similar reasons, though its stock rose less.
- Nebius has climbed 193% this year, far outpacing the broader market.
Nebius Group is having a strong Thursday. The AI infrastructure company’s stock rose as much as 9% intraday to $248.90, after starting the session with a smaller 6.4% gain to $241.20.
The catalyst was a fresh call from BNP Paribas Exane. Analyst Daniel Wang lifted his rating on Nebius to Outperform from Neutral and raised his price target to $399, up from $260.
That new target implies notable upside from where the stock sat before the move. It also makes BNP Paribas one of the more bullish voices on Wall Street covering the name.
Why analysts are turning more positive
The upgrade follows a run of company developments that have strengthened the bull case. Earlier this month, Nebius told customers it would raise prices across its on-demand GPU cloud services starting October 1.
Nvidia H100, H200, B200, and B300 instance rates are set to climb by roughly 17% to 21%. AMD EPYC Genoa CPU pricing is going up around 25%.
Investors are reading this as a sign of tight AI compute supply rather than a cost-cutting move. It’s the second round of price increases in just a few months.
Nebius posted Q2 AI cloud revenue of $574.9 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin near 50%. Those numbers give the pricing story some financial backing.
Bank of America’s Tal Liani also kept his Buy rating on Nebius Thursday, with a $310 price target. He pointed to the company’s mix of long-term hyperscaler contracts and shorter, higher-priced deals.
Liani said Nebius is reserving some capacity for one- to three-year contracts priced at roughly double what hyperscalers charge. He argued this could push revenue per watt well above current Street estimates.
Nebius also has two large contracts with Meta Platforms and Microsoft that are expected to wrap up early next year. Wang called those deals a sign of more business to come.
“We expect incremental capacity from Q2 onwards to increasingly reflect higher priced AI cloud contracts,” Wang wrote in his note.
How Nebius compares to CoreWeave
Nebius wasn’t alone in getting an upgrade Thursday. JPMorgan’s Samik Chatterjee raised CoreWeave to Overweight from Neutral and bumped his price target to $125 from $120.
CoreWeave stock rose too, but by a smaller 4% to $90.14. Nebius has gained 193% year to date, while CoreWeave is up 25% over the same stretch.
Chatterjee pointed to the same trend driving the Nebius call: rising AI compute prices. Northland Equity Capital Markets estimates hourly compute rental fees have risen about 33% since December.
The broader market didn’t help explain the move. The Nasdaq was down 0.5%, the S&P 500 slipped 0.4%, and the Dow fell 0.4% on the day, so the Nebius rally was driven entirely by company-specific news.
Nebius remains well below its 52-week high of $299.86 even after Thursday’s gain. Its current market cap sits at roughly $64.19 billion, with average trading volume near 20.4 million shares.
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