Aug 12 (Reuters) – Nebius beat quarterly revenue estimates on Wednesday as booming demand for AI infrastructure helped it land ‌larger contracts and increase prices, sending shares of the cloud-computing ‌company more than 15% higher in premarket trading.

The results, which followed forecast raises by ​larger rival CoreWeave, showed that AI demand at the so-called neocloud firms continues to outstrip capacity, supporting their plans to spend billions of dollars on new infrastructure.

Revenue at Nebius’ mainstay AI cloud unit rose nearly ‌six-fold, powering overall sales ⁠to $582.3 million in the second quarter ended June, which beat estimates of $572.75 million, according to LSEG data.

Nebius ⁠is converting growing demand into “contracted, profitable growth”, CEO Arkady Volozh said.

The Nvidia- powered AI cloud provider closed four deals averaging over $1 billion each during ​the quarter. ​Total contract value nearly quadrupled ​from the prior quarter, while ‌new-customer contract values jumped more than ninefold.

Capital expenditures totaled about $5.7 billion during the quarter, topping analysts’ expectations of $4.7 billion, according to Visible Alpha, as Nebius continued investing aggressively in GPUs and data-center expansion.

Nebius said it could sell all of its planned 2027 capacity at current ‌terms but was retaining some capacity ​to capture future demand.

It raised its contracted ​power target for the end ​of 2026 to 5 gigawatts from more than ‌4 gigawatts previously and said it ​expects to deploy ​more than 1 GW of capacity annually starting in 2027.

The company expects more than $9 billion in customer prepayments this year ​and said it has ‌more than $40 billion in customer commitments.

Nebius’ shares have surged more ​than 130% so far this year.

(Reporting by Rashika Singh ​in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)