Nebius told CNBC on Wednesday that the price it can charge for AI computing is rising faster than it expected, a bullish signal delivered just as investors have begun to doubt the business model the company and its peers are built on. Marc Boroditsky, Nebius's chief revenue officer, said a capacity auction the firm ran on Tuesday showed "continued upward mobility" in the price per megawatt, and that if the company brought its 2027 capacity online today it would sell out. Chase Lochmiller, chief executive of the Nvidia-backed builder Crusoe, offered the same read, saying older chips now fetch more than when they were new: "We're seeing higher pricing for H100s than what we saw when they were first deployed in 2023."
The optimism lands against mounting financial strain. CoreWeave, the largest of the neoclouds, the companies that borrow heavily to buy Nvidia GPUs, build data centers and rent the capacity out, has seen the spread on its five-year credit default swaps reach levels usually read as signs of distress, with its bond yields climbing too. That has dragged down shares of rivals Nebius and Iren over the past month. Boroditsky's answer was to distance his company from the leader: "we're not carrying the kind of debt that they are."
The debt matters because of what it is buying. Business Insider reported that Amazon, under a new "Early Rack Receipt" process, expected to take delivery of about $5 billion of Nvidia's GB300 server racks before final deployment, with roughly $3 billion more arriving each month "for the foreseeable future." Some AWS sites had space for the racks but not enough power to switch them on, leaving finished hardware staged in warehouses: a phenomenon the industry calls "dark GPUs," chips bought but sitting idle. At least one AWS team, the internal emails said, had no "clear forecasted path" for getting the incoming racks into data centers.
That is the tension beneath the rising prices: money goes out the door years before the revenue comes in. Amazon expects about $220 billion in capital expenditure this year, more than any other big technology company, and its free cash flow turned negative last quarter for the first time since 2023. Debt can bridge the gap, but lenders have grown warier of the biggest data center projects even as operators insist demand is limitless. The result is a market where scarcity is real, in power and GPUs alike, yet the balance sheets financing it look increasingly stretched.
Washington has noticed the strain the buildout puts on the grid. President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social early Wednesday that large data centers should be "mandated by me to make their own electricity" and should pay a "dividend" to the communities that host them, arguing that facilities "highly unpopular in a certain area, have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck." The post echoes the power constraints that this week forced Microsoft to abandon a planned UK supercomputer site, and puts a political label on the same bottleneck the neoclouds are racing to buy their way around.
What remains unresolved is whether today's prices can hold. Rising rents for H100s and even older A100s reflect a shortage that more supply is meant to relieve, and Boroditsky himself expects his 2027 and possibly 2028 capacity to sell out. The open question, which CoreWeave's widening credit spreads frame sharply, is whether demand and prices stay high long enough for the borrowed billions, some of them sitting dark in warehouses, to earn their return.