It booked $582 million and spent $5.7 billion in the same quarter, and still holds $8 billion in cash

Nebius booked $582.3 million in the second quarter. That is 454% more than a year earlier, and capex in the same quarter came to $5.7 billion.

NVIDIA-backed Nebius says AI capacity demand is so hot it could sell out 2027 today (Benzinga, 2026-08-12)

출처: benzinga.com

Nebius buys NVIDIA chips, installs them in data centers, and rents the compute out by the hour. There is always one sore spot in that arithmetic. The money for chips and buildings leaves first, and the rent comes back spread over years.

The customer pays first

Around 70% of second-quarter contracts carried customer prepayments, and the company says those prepayments cover 50% to 60% of the related capex. A prepayment is money handed over before the thing is delivered. Instead of the builder borrowing from a bank and repaying later, the tenant puts up half the construction cost in advance.

That report puts second-quarter adjusted EBITDA at $236.2 million and the margin at 41%, up from 32% in the first quarter. Cash from operations came to $2.3 billion. This is why a company spending far more than it earns still ended June with $8 billion on hand. The risk has not disappeared, though. It has moved. If a customer that paid in advance cannot carry the contract to the end, what remains on the other side is a finished building and chips already bought.

Power gets locked in before revenue does

The company lifted its year-end contracted power target from more than 4 gigawatts to 5 gigawatts. The source post reports short-term deals being priced above $40 million per megawatt per year.

What Nebius has to show in early 2027

So where does this growth get confirmed. The company kept its 2026 revenue guidance of $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion and a year-end annual recurring revenue target of $7 billion to $9 billion. Annual recurring revenue is what the contracts already signed would produce if they ran for a full year. Getting from $3.0 billion at the end of June to $7 billion by year-end means more than doubling again across two quarters. Reach it and the story of building on prepayments and selling what was built holds up; fall short and the reading is that power was locked in ahead of demand that did not arrive as quickly. Whether the $9 billion of prepayments lands on schedule is the signal that shows up first, quarter by quarter, in the meantime.