(March 16): Meta Platforms Inc will pay as much as US$27 billion over the next five years for access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence infrastructure from cloud provider Nebius Group NV as it spends aggressively to compete with the industry’s top frontier models.
Nebius, a so-called neocloud that operates data centres and has a strategic partnership with Nvidia Corp, will provide Meta with US$12 billion of dedicated capacity starting in early 2027, the Dutch company said in a statement Monday. Meta also committed to buy as much as US$15 billion in additional capacity that the cloud provider is building for third-party customers.
The outlay represents one of the biggest single contracts that Meta has signed, underscoring the Instagram and Facebook owner’s push for more computing capacity to power the development of AI products. Last year, it signed a separate US$3 billion deal with Nebius.
Meta and some of its largest tech peers are expected to spend some US$650 billion in 2026 to build data centres and purchase other infrastructure in anticipation of an AI services explosion in the coming years. Meta has made AI the company’s top priority and is investing heavily to compete with rivals like OpenAI and Google. It has also inked multi-billion-dollar partnership agreements with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc for AI infrastructure since the start of the year. And Meta is developing its own chips in-house.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last year that Meta will spend US$600 billion on US infrastructure projects by 2028. To do so, Meta has leaned on profits generated by its advertising business but has also raised outside financing to fund infrastructure projects. The company is developing its own high-end models and has built several AI products, including a chatbot, that is available inside its various apps.
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A spokesperson for Meta confirmed the Nebius deal and said its strategy of diversifying its partnerships and technology stack for AI was part of “building a more resilient and flexible infrastructure".
Nebius, which is based in Amsterdam and split off from the Russian internet giant Yandex in 2024, is one of a handful of newcomers to capitalise on the AI boom by building data centres tailor-made to train models and run services like ChatGPT.
Nvidia has been using its enormous resources to finance this new breed of neoclouds that compete with larger cloud-computing providers like Google and Amazon.com Inc. Last week, Nvidia announced it will invest US$2 billion in Nebius, fuelling a 16% jump in the Dutch company’s shares.
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Much of Nvidia’s financing spree has gone to companies that buy its chips, leading to criticism that such circular investments are fuelling a bubble. In January, Nvidia announced a similar US$2 billion investment in Nebius's competitor CoreWeave Inc to deploy its products. It also put US$30 billion into OpenAI this year and participated in a US$2 billion funding round for UK neocloud Nscale.
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