Nvidia is investing $2bn in Nebius Group as part of a strategic partnership to expand artificial intelligence cloud infrastructure.
Nvidia told the Wall Street Journal the cash is a vote of confidence in Nebius’s engineering and will help fund large-scale AI computing infrastructure. The two outfits plan to work together to design and deploy large AI data centres.
Nebius is set to get early access to Nvidia’s latest computing kit, while the pair collaborate on software and systems for running large AI computing clusters. Nvidia is even dangling future platforms and components as part of the package.
Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang said: “AI is at another inflection point with agentic AI, driving incredible compute demand and accelerating infrastructure buildout. Nebius is building an AI cloud designed for the agentic era, fully integrated from silicon to software and powered by Nvidia’s next-generation accelerated compute. Together, we are scaling the cloud to meet the surging global demand for intelligence.”
Nebius chief executive Arkady Volozh said: “Nebius has been built for AI since day one, designed for what developers need. Now with Nvidia, we are extending that throughout the stack, from gigawatt-scale AI factories to inference and software, as we build one of the first and largest clouds for all AI builders everywhere.”
The ambition is chunky, with Nebius aiming to deploy more than five gigawatts of Nvidia systems across its platform by the end of 2030. That is the kind of power draw that turns “cloud” into “industrial estate with a substation attached”.
Nebius has already secured approval for a 1.2-gigawatt data centre campus in Independence, Missouri, spanning about 400 acres and pitched as a multi-building “AI factory”. It is expected to create roughly 1,200 construction jobs and about 130 permanent roles, with more than $650m in payments in lieu of taxes across 20 years.
Nebius vice-president US public affairs John Sutter said: “We are building AI infrastructure at scale, and we are doing it in a way that genuinely works for the communities where we operate. We are grateful to everyone who supported this project, and we intend to earn the trust of all Independence residents.”
The Missouri pitch includes closed-loop cooling to keep water use comparable to that of a restaurant or office building, noise-reduction tech, and a structure designed to avoid pushing up residential power rates. Meanwhile, Nvidia is shovelling money into the plumbing too, agreeing to $2bn investments in Lumentum and Coherent to speed up the optical interconnects AI factories need.
