Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS) shares rebounded 7.30% to $177.54 in premarket trading Monday, recovering some of Friday’s sharp losses after Truist Securities reaffirmed its Buy rating and $355 price target.
The stock had closed that session at $165.47, down 12.18%, amid broader selling in AI infrastructure companies as investors weighed borrowing costs and the funding required for data center expansion.
Nebius also announced a $10 million European AI developer-support initiative Monday, adding a separate company-specific development alongside Truist’s reiterated rating.
Truist Defends Nebius’s Valuation and Financing Position
In a research note on Sunday, Truist identified Nebius and CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) as leading AI cloud providers with contracted backlogs that offer greater visibility into future revenue.
The analysts also addressed the withdrawal of Australian data center company Firmus’s planned initial public offering, which had intensified concerns about AI infrastructure valuations and financing. They argued that the setback should not be treated as evidence of comparable weaknesses across established AI cloud operators.
Truist based its Nebius valuation on an enterprise value equal to 4.5 times the firm’s estimated 2028 revenue, above the average for AI cloud and major cloud-service peers. The analysts said the premium was justified by their expectation that Nebius would deliver industry-leading revenue growth between 2026 and 2028.
The maintained price target stands approximately 107% above Monday’s indicated premarket share price.
The firm also highlighted differences in operating scale. According to Truist analysts, Nebius had approximately 450 megawatts of active capacity, compared with 46 megawatts at Firmus and about 1,500 megawatts at CoreWeave.
Those figures refer to capacity already brought online, rather than infrastructure still awaiting completion. Truist distinguished signed customer demand from the infrastructure available to meet it. In the analysts’ view, a company with a substantial backlog but limited operational capacity still faces considerable deployment work before it can deliver the computing services needed to generate revenue.
Truist also cited SemiAnalysis’s ClusterMAX 3.0 assessment, which placed Nebius and CoreWeave as the only two providers in its Platinum tier. The assessment evaluates AI cloud platforms’ technical and operational capabilities rather than their financial strength.
Customer prepayments were another part of the firm’s financing argument. Nebius disclosed in its August earnings call that roughly 70% of deals closed during the second quarter included upfront customer payments.
The company also projected more than $9 billion in customer prepayments for 2026, which it said would reduce its need for additional debt and equity financing to fund expansion.
Five-Session Net Decline Leaves Nebius Below October 9 Closing Level
The stock’s latest rebound follows a net decline of approximately 25.2% over five trading sessions from its October 9 closing price of $221.07, despite a gain on October 15.
Even at Monday’s indicated premarket price, Nebius remained approximately 19.69% below that level.
Trading activity also increased during the retreat. Approximately 35.2 million shares changed hands Friday, compared with 9.5 million on October 9.
Meanwhile, Nebius Tokenized bStocks (NBISB) traded at $178, up 8.28% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. The tokenized instrument trades separately from Nebius shares listed on Nasdaq. Its 24-hour price change reflects a different trading period than the stock’s premarket movement.
Nebius Expands European AI Builder Program
The expanded program targets developers working on open-source AI technologies.
The initiative, developed alongside NVIDIA, Accel and European venture capital firms, combines computing grants, connections to potential investors, and community programs.
Nebius said eligible projects could include open AI models, coding agents, inference infrastructure, and tools for training and evaluating AI systems. Accel and other investment firms will help connect participating founders with potential funding sources, while Nebius and NVIDIA plan to support hackathons and developer events.
The $10 million commitment covers multiple forms of support, rather than a disclosed commitment to distribute the entire amount as direct cash investments. The European initiative expands the global AI Builder Program launched in September.