By Lucy Raitano
LONDON (Reuters) – Nebius Group said on Wednesday it would raise $3 billion to fuel growth in its core artificial intelligence cloud business, on the heels of its $17.4-billion deal with Microsoft.
The financing includes a $2 billion private offering of convertible senior notes and a $1 billion underwritten public offering of the company’s class A shares.
Goldman Sachs is lead book-running manager on the public offering alongside Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities and Citigroup as additional book-running managers.
Nebius said it will use the cash to finance continuing growth, including the acquisition of additional compute power and hardware, securing land plots with reliable providers and expanding its data center footprint.
On Monday, Amsterdam-based Nebius announced it would provide Microsoft with GPU infrastructure capacity over a five-year term. Microsoft may also acquire additional services capacity under the deal, bringing the total contract value to about $19.4 billion.
On Tuesday, its Nasdaq-listed shares soared over 49% to a record high, driven by the Microsoft deal. They are up 245% so far this year. Shares were down 5.6% in pre-market trading on Wednesday.
Nebius emerged from a deal to split the assets of Russian tech company Yandex.
Global demand for data center capacity has risen sharply in recent years as companies tap into new technologies to run their businesses, especially after the emergence of generative artificial intelligence.
(Reporting by Lucy Raitano; Editing by Amanda Cooper, Kirsten Donovan)