Whales Are Loading Up Here 🐳

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The “neocloud” market just went full beast mode — up 54% in 2024 — and it’s compounding at a projected 45%+ CAGR through 2030.

The reason? Two words: AI and sovereignty.

Countries want their data local, and companies want their compute fast.

Enter Nebius $NBIS ( ▼ 4.63% ) — the AI cloud player that’s gone from “GPU rental guy” to “full-stack orchestration boss.” Their new Nebius AI Cloud 3.0 ‘Aether’ platform brings enterprise-grade security, governance, and all the fancy knobs that make regulators and CTOs sleep at night.

Meanwhile, institutions are loading up like it’s Black Friday — with $11.7M at $90 and $8.5M at $50 strikes. Calls? 420K. Puts? 253K.

Translation: the smart money’s bullish.

Add in $100M of dark-pool inflows around $103.90, and it’s clear — big money’s quietly building positions while retail’s still licking its wounds from the pullback.

Nebius is sitting at the crossroads of a trillion-dollar shift in global cloud infrastructure.

Big dogs like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have hit their limit — too much power usage, too many compliance headaches, and too many governments yelling, “Keep our data here!”

Nebius’ answer? Build sovereign, localized clouds that play nice with AI workloads and national laws. Oh, and they’ve already bagged a $17.4B deal with Microsoft, potentially stretching to $19.4B. Not bad for the new kid on the block.

They’re no longer just leasing GPUs — they’re building the whole AI tech stack, which means fatter margins and stickier customers. After a 30% pullback from its $141 high, Nebius looks like that one stock everyone sells right before it takes off again.

For years, the “hyperscaler” model — think AWS, Azure, GCP — was king. Big, centralized data centers, global reach, massive scale.

Then generative AI showed up like a spoiled toddler demanding all the electricity and attention. Models like GPT-5 and Gemini eat power like it’s Pringles and break old cloud models that can’t scale efficiently across borders.

Power bills exploded. Regulations tightened. Latency issues made global compute feel sluggish.

So the neoclouds emerged — smaller, local, efficient players offering speed, security, and sovereignty. The whole segment ballooned 54% in 2024, and analysts expect it to keep compounding at 45%+ annually through 2030.

After the 30% dip, you’d think Nebius would be bleeding out. Nope — institutions are loading up again.

And the dark-pool inflows? $100M right around $103.90, per WhaleStream.
Even Fintel data confirms heavy off-exchange buying — short-volume ratio ~19% — classic quiet institutional accumulation.

The whales are back, and they’re not YOLOing for fun. This is measured, high-conviction buying.

When Microsoft inked that $17.4B (up to $19.4B) deal with Nebius, it wasn’t just a supply contract — it was a marriage of convenience and compute.

Nebius will now power Microsoft’s internal LLM infrastructure and its upcoming consumer AI assistant — effectively becoming a sovereign cloud wing of Microsoft’s empire.

That deal gives Nebius two superpowers:

Their facilities in Finland, Serbia, and Israel offer energy reliability and lower latency — plus they’re based in renewable-friendly regions, meaning Nebius can price GPU rentals cheaper than rivals like CoreWeave $CRVW ( ▼ 4.35% ).

With Aether 3.0, Nebius goes beyond GPU leasing — it’s now offering enterprise orchestration, IAM, observability, and policy governance. In short: it’s the sovereign version of AWS Bedrock or Azure OpenAI Service — built for countries that don’t want Uncle Sam peeking at their data.

Here’s the thing — neoclouds aren’t thriving because they’re competing. They’re thriving because supply just can’t keep up.

Nebius got ahead of it — securing energy-rich sites in Finland and Serbia, locking in cheap power and regulatory blessings before the rush.

And as 45+ nations gear up to enforce sovereignty-based data laws by 2025–26, Nebius is already sitting on an $8.2B addressable market that hyperscalers have to retrofit to reach. Nebius built for this from day one.

The risk? Nebius is growing so fast it might outpace itself.

GPU supply is tight — Nvidia’s H100s and new Blackwell chips are sold out before they’re even made. So Nebius is hustling:

That expansion could push annualized revenue to $900M–$1.1B and set up a multi-billion-dollar runway.

They’re diversifying too — new partnerships with Cloudflare, Shopify, and Prosus help reduce dependence on mega-contracts.

Yes, green capex and EU regulations could pinch margins — but Nebius’ renewable-powered, sovereignty-first setup buffers that risk. Management’s even expecting positive adjusted EBITDA by 2026.

Nebius isn’t just another GPU middleman — it’s quietly becoming the backbone of sovereign AI infrastructure.

It’s got risks (supply constraints, regulatory friction), but Nebius looks like the next AWS for nations — and Wall Street’s finally noticing. They have an average price target of $156 in the next 12 months which would be a 35% gain from current price.