Nebius breaks ground on Missouri data center, leveraging EU Cloud Law reshuffling to position as GDPR-compliant neocloud alternative.
Nebius has broken ground on a 400-acre AI data center campus in Independence, Missouri, designed for gigawatt-scale operations. The expansion signals management's confidence in long-term compute demand despite the company's stock experiencing its deepest correction of the year. The Missouri site will integrate power, cooling, and compute capacity for high-intensity AI workloads, backed by Nvidia. The company projects the campus will create over 1,300 jobs. Separately, Nebius has secured land and up to 1.2 gigawatts of power capacity for a facility in Pennsylvania, demonstrating the rapid pace of its infrastructure buildout across North America.
European regulatory momentum supports the company's expansion strategy. In June 2026, the European Commission enacted the "Cloud and AI Development Act," which aims to triple EU data center capacity within years while reducing dependence on non-European cloud providers. The law imposes strict security requirements for sensitive government data and includes provisions to ease vendor switching. Nebius, which operates from Amsterdam, is already constructing major AI data centers in Finland and Missouri—a footprint well-aligned with Europe's data-sovereignty objectives.
However, reported competitive threats have weighed on investor sentiment. Meta Platforms' planned cloud business, internally code-named "Meta Compute," spooked markets. If Meta monetizes access to its own AI compute and models externally, it becomes a direct competitor to "neocloud" providers that have depended on Meta's business. Nebius maintains a $27 billion contract with Meta; CoreWeave holds a $21 billion deal. Both stocks fell roughly 15% in a single session when the news broke. Gil Luria, managing director at D.A. Davidson, summarized the structural risk: "Companies like CoreWeave and Nebius depend on Meta for their growth—and Meta can simply move on without them."
The stock closed Friday at €194.00, up 2.79% that day but down 25.67% from its June peak of €261.00. Over the past week, the loss was 8.32%; over 30 days, 10.62%. Annualized volatility stands at 105%. The relative strength index at 44.8 suggests neutral technical positioning, with the stock trading near its 50-day moving average of €190.42.
Operating fundamentals present a contrasting picture. Nebius generated $399.0 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2026, a 684% increase year-over-year. Management projects full-year revenue above $3 billion, with potential doubling in 2027. However, the capital intensity of the buildout poses a risk. Analysts warn that profit and cash flow projections could deteriorate if moderate pricing pressure emerges in the compute market, given Nebius's reliance on external funding to cover the gap between liquidity and investment requirements.
Nvidia's equity stake in Nebius provides a strategic advantage: assured access to graphics processors, which remain the primary bottleneck in AI expansion. This partnership, combined with targeted acquisitions including Tavily and Eigen AI, positions Nebius as a vertically integrated infrastructure provider. Two questions will shape the stock's near-term trajectory: whether Nebius can capture market share under the new EU regulatory regime, and whether it can demonstrate concrete operational progress on its European and North American expansions without overextending its capital structure. The Missouri groundbreaking addresses the first question directly; the second remains open.