Rent-a-GPU cloud Nebius plans to bring online over a gigawatt of datacenter capacity every year starting in 2027, but doing so will require playing the margins and juggling a mountain of debt.

“Our future capacity pipeline effectively makes Nebius one of just a few companies in the world able to build more than a gigawatt of new capacity a year and we plan to do so in 2027,” CEO Arkady Volozh boasted on Wednesday’s earnings call.

The endeavor won’t be cheap. In 2026, Nebius says it expects to burn between $20 billion and $25 billion on capital expenditures to bring between 800 and 1,000 MW worth of bit barn capacity online.

A big chunk of that will be covered with customer prepayments — essentially deposits for future capacity. According to Nebius CFO Dado Alonso, the firm is on track to exceed $9 billion in customer prepayments this year. But this alone won’t be enough.

So like most big rent-a-GPU rackets, including CoreWeave and Lambda, Nebius is taking on debt to finance its expansion. Specifically, the company is using its GPUs and contracted cash flows as collateral to secure favorable interest rates on the coveted accelerators.

Nebius landed its first asset-backed debt facility valued at $775 million in July, and Alonso says the company will continue leaning on the financing scheme going forward. No surprise.

Along with debt financing, the company is also exploring an asset-light model where “partners finance, build, and operate the facilities, whereas Nebius brings the full-stack platform and demand,” Volozh told analysts.

In other words, Nebius gets to claim deployed capacity it didn’t have to front the cash for, but that relies on the company's ability to rent capacity for less than it can resell it for.

While hitting a gigawatt of capacity a year won’t be cheap, Volozh is confident the investment will pay off in the long run. He claims that for every megawatt deployed, Nebius will bring in between $20 million and $25 million in revenues for medium-term leases, and $40 million to $50 million for short term leases up to six months.

On the low end of the scale, that implies $20 billion a gigawatt, although Nebius Chief Product and Infrastructure Officer Andrey Korolenko notes that while the company expects to have up to a gigawatt of connected power by year’s end, not all of it will be active and generating revenue until 2027.

“You have to commission the datacenter, build the network, build the clusters, deploy the platform, then onboard the customers, and then the revenue generation starts,” he said. “That takes a few months.”

“In terms of our guidance from 800 megawatts to a gigawatt… I would think about that being active throughout the first half of 2027,” he added.

But even if Nebius has to wait until 2027 to pull a full gigawatt of capacity, that still implies a massive uplift in revenue, which is forecast to hit $3 billion to $3.4 billion for fiscal year 2026.

The past quarter accounted for just $582 million, which suggests Nebius will bring in more than $2 billion over the next two quarters if you believe its projections. There are a lot of faithful among the investor community, as its share price surged more than 30 percent on Wednesday following the report.

While revenues are expected to increase dramatically over the next few quarters, it's easy to sell dollar bills for 70 cents apiece. Whether the company actually manages to turn a profit renting the shovels of the AI gold rush is another matter entirely. In Q2, the company posted an operating loss of $176 million, a jump from the $111 million operating loss it booked in the year-ago quarter. ®