AI cloud provider Nebius forecasts 2027 capital spending of US$40 billion to US$45 billion, while 2026 revenue lands at the low end of guidance

Concept illustration: on a slightly tilted light-grey board, two cylindrical stacks of discs stand on a black baseline, a shorter beige one on the left and a taller brick-red one on the right, and a line runs from each stack to a box lettered CAPEX: the left stack's box is to its left and the right stack's box is to its right. Four grey horizontal lines are drawn on each side of the board, and in the top-right corner a blue-and-cyan angular mark sits next to a box lettered NEBIUS, from which a line runs right to a black dot. Printed on the image: US$40B–45B Nebius's self-reported 2027 capital spending forecast, vs about US$27 billion in 2026.

Nebius, a cloud provider that specializes in renting out GPU compute, reported third-quarter results and its 2027 outlook on November 12 (Nebius third-quarter earnings release, 2026-11-12). The question for GPU-rental clouds is whether revenue keeps up with capex. Nebius plans faster spending in 2027 while its 2026 revenue lands at the low end of guidance.

Nebius's shareholder letter puts 2026 capital spending at about US$27 billion and forecasts US$40 billion to US$45 billion for 2027, about 1.5 to 1.7 times as much (our calculation). The 2027 revenue outlook is US$12 billion to US$13 billion (Nebius shareholder letter, 2026-11-12).

This year's revenue is sliding toward the bottom of the range. Nebius writes that 2026 revenue will land at the low end of its US$3 billion to US$3.4 billion guidance. Nebius's earlier target for annualized recurring revenue, which is one month's recurring revenue multiplied by 12, was US$7 billion to US$9 billion by December 2026. The new target is more than US$7 billion by February 2027. That is two months later, and only the old lower bound remains.

On contracts signed in the third quarter, customer prepayments already exceed the related spending. Nebius writes that prepayments on new third-quarter contracts cover more than 100% of the capital spending tied to those contracts, against 50% to 60% in the second quarter (Nebius operating and financial review, 2026-11-12). That ratio covers only newly signed contracts.

Not proven yet: the figures are self-reported by Nebius, and the shareholder letter isn't audited How we checked →

Next to watch: Nebius's next quarterly report, on whether revenue returns to the middle of guidance and whether the prepayment ratio on new contracts holds.

Answer check: On October 18, SecondSource judged that the average price on the books of CoreWeave, which rents out GPUs, would lag new contract prices in the short term. The test was whether third-quarter revenue times four, divided by quarter-end operating power, would come in below US$10 million per megawatt. With the US$3.661 billion of revenue and more than 1.7GW of operating power in CoreWeave's press release, the result is about US$8.61 million: called it. Calling it means only that the ratio is below the threshold. Quarter-end operating power also includes machines that came online mid-quarter, so a low ratio may reflect new capacity still ramping rather than low prices; whether new contract prices pull the average up depends on next quarter. Card →

Answer check: On September 13, SecondSource judged that models and coding tools are hard to separate. One reason is that late in training a model learns its own company's tool-instruction formats too specifically. The test was how far the code-edit success rate falls short of that of Anthropic's own tool, Claude Code, when a third-party tool requires Claude to output in a strictly specified format. As of November 12, no public measurement with a Claude Code control group has turned up, so the call can't be judged. Existing measurements all compare strict mode on and off within the same tool; in user logs from the open-source coding tool Pi, for example, the edit error rate was actually higher with strict mode on. Card →

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Nov 13, 2026, alongside 16 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "AI cloud provider Nebius forecasts 2027 capital spending of US$40 billion to US$45 billion, while 2026 revenue lands at the low end of guidance." https://secondsource.io/en/news/2026-11-13-4/. Accessed access date.