In its third-quarter earnings call Thursday, the neocloud company Nebius laid out $40 billion in planned spending for 2027, far more than Wall Street had expected. It’s an ambitious plan, but it rests on a string of planned projects that are already starting to show cracks.
Nebius plans to fund the buildout by relying on customer pre-payments and loans backed by customer contracts — essentially using the future value of its data centers to finance their construction. But that can be a risky strategy if those projects get bogged down by delays or cancellations.
