Founder of Northwise. Trying to understand technology, incentives, and where the value goes.
Joined September 2026
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I remain bullish on $IREN after working through its latest earnings. The strongest evidence is coming from the terms customers are signing, especially the combination of higher prices and more money paid before service begins.
IREN disclosed a new five-year contract at about $22 million of annual revenue per IT megawatt, with the customer prepaying 90% of the associated GPU cost. It also signed a short-duration contract near $40 million per IT megawatt. Different commitments, different economics, but both help explain why delivering capacity into this market can be so valuable.
The five-year deal is particularly useful. A customer is committing to a price and supplying much of the money needed to acquire the hardware. That can reduce the financing IREN needs to arrange elsewhere and give it more room to choose how quickly it expands. The advance is then credited against future service, so it cannot be counted again as additional revenue or cash collected later.
This is where the existing contract book and the next wave of capacity need to be considered separately. Older agreements give IREN revenue visibility and help finance the build. New capacity can be sold into a stronger pricing environment. A rising share of those newer deals can lift revenue per megawatt across the fleet without assuming that Microsoft or another existing customer suddenly pays a higher price.
Our 2027 forecast illustrates how gradually that change reaches the income statement. New deals account for about 43% of billing capacity at year-end, but only 20% of revenue earned during the year in our Base case. Much of the capacity arrives late. The business can finish December with much stronger economics than its full-year results initially suggest.
I also think IREN deserves to be assessed on the business it is actually building. Its ownership of land, power and data centers gives it control over physical infrastructure and potential financing options that a pure hardware renter does not have. Mirantis adds real orchestration capabilities, including inside the NVIDIA agreement. A broader cloud offering still has to earn customer adoption and show what it contributes to pricing, reliability and retention. I have not assumed a separate software premium simply because IREN now owns the software.
That distinction runs through our work on $NBIS and $CRWV too. The sector's pricing evidence is useful, but the same rental quote cannot tell us what three different companies will earn after their contracts, operating costs and financing.
For IREN, the funding requirement remains substantial even with strong customer demand. Our Base case includes $27.15 billion of calendar 2027 capex and $5.07 billion of new equity. We allow for that dilution without relying on a share-price recovery to make the financing work. I still see an attractive opportunity, with considerable execution risk.
The first test is the initial program's customer acceptance, now targeted for January and potentially February. Later in the year, Horizon 5 and 6, Sweetwater and the Canadian conversions need to turn construction progress into paid service. Permitting and power conditions need to be followed by phase, particularly in Texas.
Our new IREN 2027 report is now live at Northwise. The financial model summary is attached below. The operating analysis is public, including the contract mix, site timing and financing. Premium includes the valuation, sensitivities and fully editable workbook.
Report link in the first reply.
ALT Northwise IREN calendar 2027 financial model summary comparing Bear, Base and Bull. Revenue: $4.93B, $5.92B and $7.51B. EBITDA before stock compensation: $3.31B, $4.21B and $5.64B. Year-end billing capacity: 526.7, 748.3 and 876 IT MW. Exit annualized revenue: $7.67B, $13.41B and $18.17B. Capex: $17.25B, $27.15B and $30.21B. Gross equity: $4.50B, $5.07B and $5.70B. The table also shows contract pricing, funding, customer credits, debt, cash and ordinary share counts. All scenarios depend on financing; exit run rate is not full-year revenue. Premium price targets are excluded.
CoreWeave $CRWV reports Tuesday and Nebius $NBIS on Thursday. Our new Northwise article proposes nine categories for AI infrastructure and a narrower definition of neocloud.
Between the October 6 and November 6 closes, Nebius lost 48.2%, CoreWeave 49.4%, IREN $IREN 47.6% and Cipher $CIFR 57.8%. The Nasdaq-100 ETF $QQQ fell 13.6% over the same period. Those companies have different customers, assets and obligations, yet for much of that period their shares moved like one trade.
Musk's October consolidation warning and last week's reports about Microsoft $MSFT tightening oversight of suppliers have kept the debate focused on whether the neocloud sector can survive its financing and delivery pressures. A project arriving late, a loan becoming more expensive and a customer finding cheaper computing elsewhere reach shareholders through different parts of the business.
We reserve “neocloud” for providers whose principal product is GPU capacity. They secure equipment from suppliers such as NVIDIA $NVDA and AMD $AMD, arrange the power and financing, and sell access. Fluidstack's managed-capacity business and Nscale's infrastructure contracts fit here. Procurement, utilization, contract pricing and the cost of capital explain much of what they earn.
When equivalent capacity becomes easier to buy, customers gain bargaining power. A merchant still owes its lenders and eventually has to replace the fleet. A protected contract or an enduring cost advantage can make that a good business, but the economics are highly sensitive to what the customer pays for access.
An integrated cloud has more ways to earn that customer's business. Storage, networking, scheduling, recovery, deployment and inference can improve how much useful work the hardware produces. Customers may stay because moving means rebuilding a production workflow, migrating data and accepting operational risk. Software can support better utilization and retention even when it is bundled into the compute bill.
That is why I place Nebius and CoreWeave among AI-native Hyperscalers. Both control infrastructure, operate substantial software stacks and deliver across major world regions. Their strategies still deserve separate treatment.
CoreWeave has built around large customer commitments that support financing and deployment. Weights & Biases, Forge and SUNK Anywhere extend it further into developer workflows and infrastructure beyond its own fleet. Nebius also uses anchor contracts, while building Token Factory, enterprise integrations and a broader customer cloud. Its partner-infrastructure model creates another route to expansion, with partners funding assets and Nebius supplying the operating platform and customer relationship.
My view of Nebius's long-term resilience rests on that combination. It can compete on the cost and reliability of completing a workload, and it can distribute its platform through infrastructure it does not have to fund entirely itself. The opportunity grows if customers keep choosing the service and partners earn enough to keep supplying capacity. Its own hardware commitments, financing and delivery still have to produce an attractive return.
IREN belongs in Emerging AI-native Hyperscalers. It starts with control of land, power and data centers, and Mirantis adds real software capability. The next step is integrating that capability into a cloud customers repeatedly use. Its latest five-year deal, with prepayments covering 90% of associated GPU capex, also shows how much contract structure can change the amount shareholders need to finance. Acquisition, customer adoption and funding are separate parts of that transition.
Lightning, Together and Crusoe Cloud sit in Full-stack AI Clouds. Our technical cutoff requires operating control of compute, core cloud services, managed workloads, integrated AI workflows and enterprise delivery. AI-native Hyperscalers add delivered geographic reach, repeated large deployments and customer breadth. A large GPU count alone tells us little about those capabilities.
We retain Hyperscalers for Amazon $AMZN, Microsoft, Alphabet $GOOGL and Oracle $ORCL, and use GP Cloud Providers for smaller or more regional general-purpose clouds such as DigitalOcean $DOCN. Fireworks, Baseten, Modal and Replicate within Cloudflare $NET sit among AI Software and Inference Specialists. Compute Marketplaces form another category because matching buyers with third-party capacity creates different inventory and operating obligations.
HPC Infrastructure and Hosting covers businesses such as $WULF, $CIFR, $CORZ, $APLD, $HUT, $RIOT and $KEEL, with Galaxy $GLXY's Helios and mixed businesses such as Bitdeer $BTDR assessed by activity. Their economics run through power, construction, rent, tenant credit and the next lease. A tenant's GPU rental price can fall while the host continues collecting contracted rent; that pressure may reach the host later through tenant health or renewal terms.
SpaceX $SPCX illustrates why the business line comes first. External GPU contracts, Grok, Cursor, captive training, Starlink and launch belong in different parts of the analysis. One corporate name can contain several economic models.
A cheaper GPU hour can squeeze a capacity merchant, lower an inference specialist's input cost and create room for a cloud to deliver more useful work at a better price. The same change can arrive much later in a landlord's cash flow. Those differences should shape what we expect from earnings and what we are willing to pay for the business.
When CoreWeave and Nebius report, newly delivered capacity, customer adoption and funding terms will tell us more about their future earnings than the neocloud label. The valuation should follow what each company can retain after paying for the infrastructure and capital its customers need.
Full article in the first reply.
ALT Northwise map of nine AI infrastructure categories. Broad cloud ecosystems: Hyperscalers and GP Cloud Providers. Integrated AI services: AI-native Hyperscalers, Full-stack AI Clouds and Emerging AI-native Hyperscalers. Capacity access: Neoclouds and Compute Marketplaces. Specialized functions: AI Software and Inference Specialists, and HPC Infrastructure and Hosting. Each category includes its customer product and company examples, separating cloud platforms, GPU capacity, software execution and physical hosting.
Nebius $NBIS can use partnerships to reach power and sites that would take time to recreate itself. CLT1 shows why that can help a cloud expand, and why the economics need to be examined on both sides of the agreement.
This is a former Bitcoin hosting property in South Carolina, where AIB plans to deliver two 25 MW AI halls for Nebius. Spartanburg County has a data-center moratorium, but CLT1 has an electricity agreement and a proposed development agreement that has passed second reading. Final approval remains ahead. That combination gives the project a more concrete route forward than a power announcement alone.
The map helps explain what is being assembled. The building has to fit alongside electrical equipment, cooling infrastructure, neighboring homes, stream buffers and drainage. The usable asset emerges when the site, power, engineering and local permission all work together. Recreating that combination elsewhere requires more than buying another parcel.
For Nebius, working with AIB means another developer can advance that physical infrastructure while Nebius builds elsewhere. It can pursue several routes to capacity at once, drawing on power positions and development work it did not have to originate entirely itself.
But the economic cost of the facility still reaches Nebius through the hosting agreement and customer prepayments. Nebius also supplies the servers and GPUs. AIB must earn a return on the infrastructure it develops, while Nebius must earn enough from customers to cover hardware, hosting, operations and financing. The value created by a scarce power location is shared across those businesses.
I would judge the arrangement by whether the time gained and revenue opportunity justify those commitments. Owning a campus gives Nebius more control and the potential benefit of later expansion. A hosting agreement can provide another route to growth, with a different allocation of costs and responsibilities. Either can produce attractive returns if the economics and delivery work.
Financing connects the two companies before the first GPU is installed. Nebius's commitment helps AIB raise project capital; Nebius then depends on AIB delivering the facility. AIB's October presentation still showed financing incomplete and estimated Q4 2027 delivery. Slippage at the host can move Nebius's revenue into a later period while its demand opportunity remains intact.
This is where my broader view of Nebius as a cloud platform meets the physical business. Software and customer relationships can help it earn more from the infrastructure it accesses. Shareholders benefit when those advantages leave an attractive return after paying everyone required to deliver the service. CLT1 gives us a specific project on which to follow that process, from local approvals through to the economics of serving customers.
A former Bitcoin hosting property in South Carolina could become two 25 MW AI halls for Nebius $NBIS. Its next county vote is on the tentative November 16 agenda, as the project works through a local data-center moratorium.
At CLT1 in Moore, AIB plans to replace the old container installation with a purpose-built facility under a 12-year Nebius hosting agreement.
Fifty megawatts can get lost beside the much larger campuses in Nebius's plans. Each completed hall would give the company another place to install GPUs and serve customers while the wider network expands. AIB develops the building, power infrastructure and cooling; Nebius supplies the computing equipment.
The county documents put that opportunity into focus. Second reading passed on November 3, and the new packet includes a proposed site plan and design standards. We see a credible route through the moratorium, with the final agreement and permits still outstanding.
AIB's October presentation estimates delivery of both halls in Q4 2027. Financing was still incomplete in that presentation, and active Nebius IT capacity at CLT1 has not been publicly confirmed. Construction, equipment installation and customer activation will determine when the contracted capacity starts earning revenue.
Our new standalone report follows the property from Bitcoin hosting to the proposed AI redevelopment, explains the power and approval path, and connects CLT1 to the wider Nebius footprint.
Full report in the first reply.
ALT Thomas & Hutton's proposed CLT1 site plan in Moore, South Carolina, dated November 6, 2026. The drawing shows the proposed building, electrical and mechanical yards, nearby homes, stream buffers and detention basins. Proposed design, not completed construction or final approval.
I recently said our $NBIS 2027 model was some of the strongest work the team had produced, yet one of our least-viewed Nebius reports.
With the fear and volatility across AI infrastructure and Nebius reporting Thursday, I wanted more people to have access to that work before earnings. We’ve opened the full report, including the analysis behind our $479.29 probability-weighted target for December 2027.
I’ve been writing about the problems with grouping these businesses together as “neoclouds.” The debate around cheaper compute is a good example of how much gets lost.
Our report works through how Rubin could allow Nebius to earn more revenue from each megawatt while customers pay less for the work their applications actually complete. The performance gains can be large enough for both sides to benefit.
That illustration uses NVIDIA’s workload-specific performance preview, so utilization and negotiated pricing will determine how much of the opportunity Nebius captures. But it gives us a much more useful way to examine the business than assuming falling compute costs automatically destroy its economics.
Nebius’s software and inference platform add another dimension: helping customers get more useful work out of that infrastructure, reducing idle capacity and giving them reasons to stay as hardware becomes more widely available.
This is the detail I want Northwise to bring to a sector where sentiment can move much faster than people can work through the underlying businesses. Financing and execution deserve scrutiny. So does the possibility that consensus is substantially underestimating what Nebius can earn.
After Thursday’s earnings, we’ll use the refreshed data to build separate Premium models for 2027, 2028, 2029 and 2030, following the expansion year by year.
For now, the report below is open to everyone. I hope it helps you go into earnings with a stronger understanding of the thesis. And to our members, thank you for supporting the research that makes releases like this possible.
With $NBIS reporting Thursday, November 12, and so much fear and volatility across AI infrastructure, we’ve made our latest Nebius 2027 report free to read in full, including the valuation and every price target our Premium members received in October.
We think the market is underestimating how much business Nebius can deliver next year. In our October 26 report, we forecast $21.86B of 2027 revenue against the $12.24B Street estimate we reviewed, a gap of 78.5%. Our EBITDA forecast is $12.49B against $6.53B, or 91.3% higher.
Most of that difference comes from the amount of capacity we expect to earn revenue during 2027. We worked through the sites, hardware deliveries, customer commitments and commissioning schedules quarter by quarter. At our expected fleet yield, the Street revenue estimate would require roughly 513 average billable MW. Our model reaches about 938 MW.
Our targets for December 31, 2027:
Bear: $340.31
Base: $471.44
Bull: $628.75
Probability-weighted: $479.29
We weight those cases 30%, 40% and 30%. Even our Bear case produces $19.07B of revenue, more than 50% above the Street estimate in the report. Our disagreement with consensus runs through the operating forecast, well before we put a valuation multiple on the business.
The build accelerates sharply toward the end of 2027. Our Base case closes the year with 1,613 MW of accepted IT capacity, but much of it earns revenue for only part of the year. Pennsylvania and Independence arrive late in our schedule. We expect a much larger business by December, while recognizing that a delayed commissioning date would remove months of revenue from the forecast.
We also follow who is paying for that capacity and on what terms. Longer contracts bring customer advances that help fund construction and equipment. Shorter contracts give Nebius more exposure to the prices customers are willing to pay for scarce compute. We expect that mix to support strong growth, with the financing burden increasing if prices weaken or customers contribute less cash upfront.
Our Base case includes $58.77B of cash capex and $12.46B of new equity during 2027. Those new shares are already included in our targets. We remain bullish after allowing for that financing because we expect the additional capacity to support far more revenue and earnings than the Street estimates in our report.
Thursday’s disclosures will help us judge whether the sites, contracts and financing are progressing as we expect. After earnings, we’ll refresh the data and publish separate Premium models for each individual year: 2027, 2028, 2029 and 2030. Members will be able to follow how the expansion develops year by year, including the revenue, funding needs and dilution along the way.
Our members received this research first, and their support allows us to open selected reports to the wider community. We hope this one gives people something useful to work through ahead of Thursday. The full report is linked in the first reply. Thanks again for supporting independent research.
ALT Northwise Nebius 2027 price targets in US dollars per share for December 31, 2027: Bear $340.31 with 30% weight, Base $471.44 with 40% weight, Bull $628.75 with 30% weight, and probability-weighted target $479.29. Full report now free to read at northwiseproject.com.
We are working on a Northwise proposal to reclassify the companies being grouped together as “neoclouds,” separating their business models, financing needs and exposure to commoditization.
Watching $NBIS get sold alongside the rest of the neocloud trade has reinforced something I think our sector needs to address: we are using one label for businesses with very different ways of making money.
The financing fears are real. Expensive infrastructure, depreciating GPUs, large customers with bargaining power, and capital commitments that arrive before revenue have contributed to selling across Nebius $NBIS, CoreWeave $CRWV, IREN $IREN and other AI infrastructure names. Those pressures affect a GPU renter, a cloud platform and a landlord differently.
A company that acquires scarce GPUs from suppliers such as NVIDIA $NVDA and AMD $AMD, finances them and rents them to customers benefits from the supply shortage. If supply catches up, customers gain alternatives and rental pricing comes under pressure. The debt, equipment costs and eventual replacement bill remain.
For Nebius, a significant part of my conviction comes from the software platform, managed inference, enterprise relationships and distribution it is building around the hardware. Token Factory already serves production workloads. Its infrastructure partnership model creates a route for Nebius to supply the cloud platform and customer relationship while partners finance and own the facilities and GPUs.
If customers choose Nebius because it helps them deploy models, run them reliably and complete useful work at a lower cost, its value can extend beyond the scarcity of a particular GPU. If partners can earn acceptable returns while paying Nebius to operate and distribute their capacity, Nebius can expand without funding every increment of hardware itself.
I see Nebius developing into an AI-native hyperscaler, with more ways to retain customers and earn revenue as raw computing becomes more competitive. That is the basis for my view that its long-term commoditization risk is meaningfully different from that of a merchant GPU renter.
Nebius still has substantial infrastructure commitments, large dedicated-capacity customers, financing requirements and delivery risks. Software must translate into adoption and better economics. Partners must make money too. Recent concerns about Microsoft $MSFT’s oversight of projects need to be examined company by company, including for Nebius. We should be able to recognize the platform opportunity while being specific about the obligations required to build it.
CoreWeave $CRWV also has substantial software and developer tools, alongside its strategy of using large customer commitments to support infrastructure financing. IREN $IREN’s physical infrastructure and Mirantis acquisition give it a different starting point. Acquiring established software brings capabilities, but integrating those capabilities into a cloud offering that customers adopt takes further work.
TeraWulf $WULF and Cipher $CIFR sell hosting infrastructure under a different set of obligations. Fireworks and Baseten compete around the software and operations required to serve models. Their customers are paying for different things, and their shareholders are exposed to different costs.
A decline in GPU rental prices can squeeze a merchant’s spread, lower an inference provider’s input costs, and leave an existing fixed hosting lease largely unchanged in the near term. Competition, contract terms and customer health determine how those effects eventually reach shareholders. Calling all of that “neocloud risk” obscures the differences we need to model.
The proposal will span established clouds such as Amazon $AMZN, Microsoft $MSFT, Alphabet $GOOG and Oracle $ORCL; AI-native platforms; specialist clouds; merchant GPU providers; inference software; and physical infrastructure. It will also distinguish the business lines and stages of development within names such as $CORZ, $APLD, $HUT, $BTDR and $KEEL.
The work will distinguish what each company delivers today from what it hopes to become. We’ll examine who funds the assets, who bears their replacement cost, who controls the customer relationship and what keeps that relationship valuable as supply expands.
We should be able to explain why Nebius and CoreWeave belong in a broader platform category while pursuing different strategies, why IREN’s software ambitions deserve attention without being treated as a finished product, and why a hosting company can have a defensible business without owning an inference stack.
Those differences should drive our revenue assumptions, financing models and valuations, even when the stocks move together.
Expect new $IREN $CRWV and $NBIS models soon from the team following respective earnings.
We are pushing hard to refresh and revamp our core AI infra research to help shine some detailed analysis on the sector.
There is still a lot of FUD and fear circling.
Stay patient, average in to the highest quality names in the space, and make sure you know the thesis backwards and forwards, whether its from our work or from other fantastic independent coverage names in the space.
I put more weight on the source of NVIDIA $NVDA's earnings growth than on the size of a buyback announcement.
In our central forecast, normalized diluted EPS rises from $8.82 in calendar 2026 to $33.77 in 2030. Revenue growth does most of that work. The margin changes are a small drag, while the lower net weighted-average share count adds to the result.
That tells me where to spend my research time. The big questions are whether customers can fund the equipment, whether NVIDIA can deliver it and how much value the company retains as competition improves.
Repurchases help the per-share outcome. They cannot carry this forecast if the operating expansion disappoints. These are forecasts, not reported results or stock-return estimates.
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Be patient today with $NBIS and others.
Don’t over-leverage.
The fundamentals will eventually take charge of the sentiment and picture.
Earnings continue to explode around the market, and demand remains n a consistent upwards trend.
That does not mean the market has to rally back next week.
I see this as a possible bottom, but it could be a 2018 like scenario.
Yesterday definitely felt near capitulation, but that’s often where a last unexpected down move finishes.
The red is a bit blinding, but this is a phenomenal opportunity to pick up the highest names across tech.
Some names we like most here:
AI Infra:
$NBIS
$AMD
$NVDA
Fintech:
$SOFI
$NU
$HOOD
Hyperscalers:
$AMZN
$GOOG
$META
Emerging:
$MELI
$JMIA
$GRAB
Discretionary:
$CELH
$HNST
$HIMS
Bonus:
$RKLB
$NFLX
$MU
$SNDK
With the market officially in correction territory, I believe it’s prudent to keep a long term horizon and to slowly move risk on in lots.
NFA, but we are buyers across Northwise and personal allocations with some valuations hitting GFC levels.
I find the AST SpaceMobile $ASTS competitive debate more useful when I start with what the customer must do to use the service.
Broadband through a separate terminal, emergency messaging on a supported device and a carrier service reaching an ordinary phone solve different problems. Their capabilities can overlap over time, but their adoption requirements and economics are different.
The appeal of AST's approach is straightforward: keep the phone, number and carrier relationship, then extend coverage where the terrestrial network falls away. That could make adoption easier because the carrier already has the customer.
The tradeoff is that the carrier is also a sophisticated wholesale buyer. Distribution reach does not tell me what AST will earn per line, how much capacity each line will consume or how bargaining power will be shared.
I built those questions into the free operating model accompanying the report. They are more useful starting points than treating the entire satellite industry as one market.
northwiseproject.com/researc…
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We’re going to be deep diving heavily back into the AI infra buildout here soon.
Core model updates coming to $NBIS $CRWV $IREN to start. Looking to build year by year through 2030 with an emphasis of separating fact from FUD regarding where these names stand today.
We remain very constructive on the sector as a whole with special credit to those with a healthy balance sheet, plenty of financing flexibility for the buildout ahead, and those creating full AI native integrated stacks.
Overall, we believe the current market dynamics are extremely sentiment driven and could flip “overnight” at any time.
We aren’t predictors of short term technicals, but we believe the flip will come now or over the next several months.
In the meantime, we see a multitude of opportunities across the sector and continue to average into the most high quality names.
We view this is a generational buying opportunity for the next leaders in Cloud.
The fundamental picture has not worsened and if anything valuations are more attractive across tech as a whole than they have been over many years.
We are buyers and will continue to be at these prices, unless the thesis is fundamentally proven broken.
Congrats to those who picked up $NBIS under $150.
Our smaller active internal fund is now 100% nebius for the time being.
We might not be completely out of the woods yet, but I do see a lot of narratives dissipating/reframing after today.
Don’t underestimate how much politics influences the markets at times.
Really good opportunity to return to the fundamentals with earnings coming up.
Highly recommend checking out our 2027 model to familiarise yourself at some differentiated perspectives.
We expect a very large beat of street estimates for 2027, but management will likely raise guidance for exit ARR and capex a few times before it’s all said and done to keep some stability.
An older GPU can still work perfectly and be worth replacing.
For a power-constrained operator such as Nebius $NBIS or IREN $IREN, the same power slot might support a newer NVIDIA $NVDA system that earns more after its costs.
I compare those two uses of power. Book depreciation, the old machine's remaining cash contribution and the cost of installing its replacement can point to different dates.
I see room for a replacement cycle, but its timing has to be earned by better economics.
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AST SpaceMobile $ASTS could build a high-margin service and still need substantial recurring investment to keep that service running. Satellites have to be replaced.
That is why I look beyond the $3.57B of EBITDA in the report's Base 2030 forecast. The same forecast produces about $2.23B of cash after that year's investment, while the normalized owner-cash calculation comes to roughly $1.86B after allowing for recurring economic burdens, including satellite replacement.
Those are different views of the business. I would not subtract the normalized replacement reserve again from cash flow that already includes actual investment.
The seven-year satellite-life assumption implies roughly $890M of annual replacement spending once the modeled constellation matures. Shorter useful lives would raise that burden.
I want a successful constellation to fund its own renewal and still leave meaningful cash for owners. High EBITDA margins are encouraging, but the replacement cycle helps determine how much of that success shareholders can ultimately keep.
Our $NBIS 2027 model and forecast might be our least viewed model for Nebius yet, but I think it's the most well done by the team and the most significant and relevant timing wise.
We are planning a massive build after Nebius earnings, where we are going to leverage this new data and model to fill in the gaps and model out 2028, 2029, and then a new 2030 model using this year by year approach in hand with our ground-up data center capacity data.
It's never been more important to understand the fundamentals of this sector and Nebius' specific circumstances.
If you follow our work and haven't yet pulled the trigger on a membership, we are running our first year anniversary sale until early Monday morning.
I highly recommend seeing if its a fit for your individual research workflow.
Members get our full price targets for 30+ names, both flagship and active growth portfolios, data center tracker, imbedded capacity built financial forecasting tools for $NBIS $IREN $CRWV $CIFR $KEEL and $WULF and support our goal of bringing a full time research team to Northwise.
Regardless, cheers to an incredible full first year of Northwise memberships and a special thanks to those who continue to support our journey to fill the gap between institutional and retail research.
northwiseproject.com/checkou…
Nebius $NBIS is nearly 50% below its all-time high, and the fear spreading through AI infrastructure is hard to ignore: what if demand keeps growing, but the companies building for it run out of money?
The pressure on $CRWV and $IREN shows how widely that fear has spread. For businesses buying expensive GPUs and renting out computing capacity, access to financing can decide whether a full order book ever becomes a good outcome for shareholders.
We think the market is underestimating how much revenue Nebius can bring online in 2027. Our base case forecasts $21.9B of revenue and $12.5B of EBITDA as new capacity enters service.
But getting there requires $58.8B of cash capex. Even with $21.6B of operating cash flow, including customer prepayments, that leaves roughly $37.2B to fund. The timing of those advances, the availability of secured debt and the price of new equity all matter.
That is where our conviction has to earn its keep. We follow the capacity through delivery, contracts and cash, then account for the debt and dilution needed to build it. Slower commissioning or worse financing terms change the outcome.
We've made the full operating analysis and the bear, base and bull results free to read. The image below puts the capacity, earnings, cash requirements and share count together so you can see what our view depends on.
The new Nebius 2027 report is in the first reply.
ALT Northwise's public Nebius 2027 operating forecast, with Bear, Base and Bull scenarios and a quarterly Base case. Revenue ranges from $19.07B to $24.61B, with $21.86B in Base. EBITDA ranges from $10.26B to $14.82B, with $12.49B in Base. Base operating cash flow is $21.60B and cash capex is $58.77B, leaving a $37.18B funding gap. The table also shows capacity, customer advances, new debt, equity and share counts. Figures are Northwise forecasts, not company guidance.
Remember $NBIS is trading for less than one time our projected 2027 ARR.
If we are too high by 50%, nebius is still trading less than two times next year’s exit.
Not many opportunities to intersect that deep of value, elite management, and an insatiable demand environment.
I am bullish on NVIDIA $NVDA, but I do not treat better AI efficiency as automatic proof that equipment demand will rise.
If the computing needed for a fixed-quality task falls to one-quarter, task volume has to quadruple just to keep aggregate computing unchanged. Double the tasks and computing falls by half. Eight times the tasks would double it.
Those are hypothetical examples, but they put a real question in front of the thesis: how much useful new work becomes economical as the price falls?
For Nebius $NBIS and IREN $IREN, utilization and the price customers will pay matter alongside task growth. I want to see new applications absorb the savings, and enough demand left over to justify more machines.
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When I follow a launch for AST SpaceMobile $ASTS, I try to connect it to four separate business clocks: when cash leaves, when hardware is ready, when it enters service and when a carrier can be billed.
Those dates can be far apart. Paying for a satellite does not put it in orbit. Reaching orbit still leaves deployment, testing and commissioning. Carrier integration and commercial readiness matter before the hardware can support recurring revenue.
That timing is why a delay can hurt even if the eventual constellation works. Construction spending may continue while the associated receipts move further out.
I also separate an insurance recovery from service restoration. Cash compensation can help fund a replacement, but it cannot instantly replace the missing coverage or recover every lost month of sales.
The attached six-satellite loss case is a hypothetical stress test. I use it to examine how operational setbacks travel through the business, rather than treating a successful launch count as a complete financial forecast.
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