Nebius Group just picked up one of the boldest endorsements in the AI infrastructure race this year, with BNP Paribas Exane lifting its price target to $399 from $260 and upgrading the stock to Outperform. The call, made on September 24, sent shares climbing roughly 9% intraday and added fresh momentum to what has already been a standout year for Nebius AI infrastructure growth. Behind the upgrade sits a company that quadrupled its revenue in a single quarter and is now betting big on the future of cloud computing for artificial intelligence.
Key takeaways
BNP Paribas Exane upgraded Nebius to Outperform on September 24, raising its price target from $260 to $399, a 53% increase.
Nebius stock jumped about 9% intraday on the news and has gained roughly 193% year-to-date.
Q2 2026 revenue hit $582 million, up 454% year-over-year, with the AI segment alone contributing $575 million, a 514% jump.
Annualized run-rate revenue reached about $3 billion by June 2026, and BNP Paribas projects it could climb to around $22 billion by the end of 2027.
Nebius is raising GPU cloud prices effective October 1, with Nvidia instances up 17-21% and select AMD services up roughly 25%.
BNP Paribas Upgrades Nebius Stock Amid Strong Performance
BNP Paribas Exane’s decision to raise its price target on Nebius by 53% signals that one of Europe’s largest banks now sees significantly more room for the stock to run. The brokerage moved its rating to Outperform and pushed the target from $260 to $399, describing a “significantly enhanced outlook” since it first initiated coverage in June. That kind of jump in a price target rarely happens without a major shift in how analysts read a company’s growth trajectory.
Details of the Price Target Increase
The new $399 target implies roughly 60% upside from where shares were trading after the announcement. For a stock that has already delivered outsized gains this year, that’s a notable statement of confidence from BNP Paribas, and it puts Nebius stock performance firmly in the spotlight for investors tracking the broader AI infrastructure buildout.
Immediate Stock Market Reaction
Shares reacted fast. Nebius climbed approximately 9% intraday, trading between $246 and $249 on the day of the upgrade. That single-day pop extends an already remarkable run: the stock is up about 193% year-to-date, making it one of the more talked-about names in the AI infrastructure space this year.
Nebius’s Explosive Revenue Growth in AI Infrastructure
The numbers behind BNP Paribas’s optimism are hard to ignore. In Q2 2026, Nebius posted revenue of $582 million, marking a 454% jump from the same period the prior year — a growth trajectory that has come to characterize firms swept up in the ongoing AI expansion.
Q2 2026 Revenue Highlights
A 454% year-over-year jump in a single quarter is rare even among fast-growing tech companies, and it underscores how quickly demand for AI compute has scaled for Nebius. That figure alone helps explain why analysts are recalibrating their expectations for the company.
AI Business Segment Expansion
Within that total, the AI business segment did the heaviest lifting, generating $575 million in Q2 2026, a 514% year-over-year increase. In other words, almost all of Nebius’s revenue growth is coming directly from its core AI infrastructure business, not from legacy operations.
Annualized Revenue Run-Rate and Future Projections
By the end of June 2026, Nebius’s annualized run-rate revenue had reached approximately $3 billion, a figure that gives a clearer picture of where the company stands on a forward-looking basis. Analysts at BNP Paribas go even further, projecting that Nebius could reach around $22 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2027. That projection, if it holds, would represent one of the steepest scaling curves seen among AI infrastructure providers to date.
Why this matters: revenue run-rate figures like these give investors a real-time snapshot of a company’s growth trajectory before annual results are finalized, and a jump from roughly $3 billion to a projected $22 billion in about a year and a half would mark an unusually aggressive expansion even by AI-industry standards.
Nebius’s Strategic Moves and Market Position
Nebius isn’t just riding demand passively — it’s actively repricing its services as that demand intensifies. The company announced GPU cloud service price hikes effective October 1, covering both Nvidia and AMD-based offerings.
Price Hikes on GPU Cloud Services
Prices for Nvidia GPU instances are set to climb by 17-21%, and certain AMD EPYC CPU offerings will rise by roughly 25%. Raising prices while demand is still climbing suggests Nebius believes it has enough pricing power in the current market to pass along higher costs without losing customers — a sign of how tight capacity remains across the AI compute market.
Transformation from Yandex to Nebius AI Infrastructure
The company’s backstory adds another layer to the current growth narrative. Previously operating under the name Yandex N.V., Nebius was the Dutch-listed parent company linked to Russia’s leading search engine. Amid geopolitical pressures that rendered the Russian operations untenable for shareholders on Western exchanges, the company shed its Russian holdings and was renamed Nebius Group in August 2024. That rebrand wasn’t cosmetic — it marked a full pivot toward AI infrastructure as the company’s core identity.
Trading and Expansion Focus
By October 2024, trading had restarted on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol NBIS. Since then, under CEO Arkady Volozh, Nebius has focused its buildout across Europe, Israel, and the US, positioning itself as a specialized cloud provider for AI workloads rather than a general-purpose hosting company.
Why this matters: Nebius’s transformation from a Russian search-engine affiliate into a Nasdaq-listed AI infrastructure company in roughly a year illustrates how quickly corporate identities are being reshaped by the AI compute race — and how capital markets are rewarding that repositioning when the revenue numbers back it up.
Article produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the editorial team.