The chip manufacturer Nvidia holds a 9.3 percent stake in Dutch AI cloud operator Nebius, according to a filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 20. Most of the roughly 22.3 million shares exist as an unexercised warrant tied to a two-billion-dollar agreement from March. Investors responded with buying, and Nebius stock climbed noticeably over two consecutive trading days.
The warrant traces back to March’s partnership
In March 2026, Nvidia invested two billion dollars in Nebius — not through a conventional stock purchase, but via a pre-funded warrant on roughly 21.1 million shares at a nominal price of $0.0001 each. The agreement also included a strategic partnership: Nebius gets early access to Nvidia’s newest hardware platforms and support designing so-called AI factories. In exchange, Nebius is set to build more than five gigawatts of Nvidia-powered computing capacity by the end of 2030.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the move at the time around the growing compute demands of agentic AI systems that handle multi-step tasks independently. Nvidia had already struck a structurally near-identical two-billion-dollar warrant deal with cloud provider CoreWeave back in January 2026 — the closest comparable case for the arrangement now disclosed at Nebius. In both cases, Nvidia positioned itself not just as a supplier but also as a capital provider tied to a central pillar of its own data center demand. Observers read the recurring pattern as an attempt to lock in long-term compute access without building additional data centers itself.
Nebius builds cloud capacity beyond its Yandex roots
Nebius emerged in 2024 from Russian technology group Yandex and is now headquartered in Amsterdam; the company trades under the ticker NBIS on Nasdaq. As a so-called neocloud provider — a data center operator specialized in AI workloads without the broad product range of traditional hyperscalers like Amazon or Microsoft — Nebius supplies infrastructure for model training, inference, and building full AI factories. Alongside Nebius, CoreWeave is among the best-known providers in this category, both of which have recently benefited sharply from GPU demand.
Nebius stock reacted to the SEC disclosure with gains across two consecutive trading days: shares rose three percent in after-hours trading Monday evening and climbed as much as seven percent in Tuesday’s pre-market session. Market value stood at roughly 46 billion dollars Tuesday morning — an independently unverified snapshot that shifts continuously with the share price. An analyst at Freedom Capital Markets upgraded the stock to buy on Monday, citing a recently placed 775-million-dollar bond as a positive catalyst for further capacity expansion.
Nvidia spans a web of stakes across the AI supply chain
The Nebius stake fits into a series of similar moves by Nvidia across the entire AI supply chain: the chipmaker holds comparable warrants in semiconductor supplier Marvell Technology, also backs Synopsys, Coherent, and Lumentum, and put 30 billion dollars into OpenAI’s 110-billion-dollar funding round as well as Anthropic’s 30-billion-dollar raise. The Nebius stake itself remains locked up for now: Nvidia cannot exercise the warrant or sell the resulting shares before September 11, 2026.
Critics accuse Nvidia of positioning itself as both the most important supplier and a shareholder of its own major customers through such warrants — a setup that further secures demand for its own chips. Nvidia did not address the strategic rationale behind the stake in its SEC filing; the disclosure is limited to plain ownership figures. For antitrust regulators, such recurring deals increasingly raise the question of how independently the supplied cloud providers can still operate given their financial entanglement with their most important supplier, and negotiate prices freely.
What matters next is whether Nvidia actually exercises the warrant after September 11 or keeps the stake purely as a financial instrument for now. With each further deal of this kind, the line between supplier and shareholder in the AI infrastructure industry blurs further — for companies renting compute from Nebius or comparable providers, that also means growing dependence on Nvidia’s pricing and supply decisions.
