Nebius Bets That Sustainable AI Infrastructure Wins Long-Term

Amsterdam-based AI cloud rocket ship growth company Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS) released its 2024 Sustainability Report this week, arguing that sustainability is a competitive advantage, not a cost center.

The report, aligned with European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), highlights how Nebius integrates energy efficiency and carbon-conscious design across its infrastructure. Their flagship Mäntsälä data center in Finland recycles waste heat to serve 65% of the local municipality’s heating needs, and nearly 94% of its energy comes from low-carbon sources. They report a PUE of 1.1, and 0.04 tCO₂-eq/MWh—among the lowest emissions intensities in tech. Custom hardware helped Nebius save 10 GWh of energy in 2024, while achieving a 20% lower total cost of ownershipcompared to traditional hyperscale setups.

In an industry notorious for high energy use, Nebius is positioning itself to be more efficient and creative.

Who Is Nebius?

Nebius operates data centers in Finland and co-location facilities in France and Iceland, and recently expanded to Kansas City and Vineland, New Jersey, where their new facility will support NVIDIA’s next-gen Blackwell chips. Unlike traditional cloud providers that depend on commodity infrastructure, Nebius follows a full-stack strategy: it designs and builds its own servers, racks, and data centers in-house, optimizing every layer — from hardware architecture to thermal management — for AI workloads.

This vertically integrated approach allows Nebius to fine-tune performance, power efficiency, and cost, giving it greater control over reliability and pricing. The result is infrastructure tailored specifically for AI model training and inference — not retrofitted general-purpose cloud setups. By controlling the full technology stack, Nebius can deliver low-latency performance, efficient cooling, and minimal hardware bottlenecks, while also driving down total cost of ownership for customers.

Rocket ship growth

Since going public in October 2024, Nebius’s stock has surged 270%, bringing its market capitalization to $12.65 billion. The company has grown revenue from $21 million in 2023 to $117 million in 2024, with Q1 2025 revenue reaching $55 million, up from just $11 million in Q1 2024. Its customer base spans developers, startups, and research labs running large-scale AI workloads.

TheMarketAI.com Take

Unlike SWI Group by Max-Herve George, which focuses on real estate data center development, or CoreWeave, which sells raw compute via cloud APIs, Nebius is going full stack—building its own custom hardware, data centers, and AI-native cloud platform.

This strategy offers deep optimization and control, but it’s capital intensive and technically demanding. Interestingly, CoreWeave’s recent acquisitions and vertical integration moves (e.g., data center buildouts and Core Scientific buyout) suggest it may be evolving toward Nebius’s model.

Still, execution will matter more than architecture. The infrastructure arms race is just beginning, and it’s not yet clear whether full-stack AI clouds or specialized players will win.

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