The Short-Seller's Shadow: Why Nebius's Billion-Dollar Momentum Is Colliding With Wall Street's Doubts
Published on 08/09/2026 at 17:32 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
When a company lands a contract worth more than a billion dollars and its stock still finishes the day lower, something unusual is happening beneath the surface. That was the scene on Friday for Nebius Group, the Nasdaq-listed AI infrastructure provider, which announced a computing capacity deal with Reflection AI valued at over $1 billion and running through 2029. The news sparked a pre-market pop of more than four percent, only for the shares to close down 1.49 percent at EUR 162.56. The market, it seems, is no longer willing to take good news at face value.
The skepticism has a name: Michael Burry. On August 6, the investor famed for his "Big Short" bet revealed he had taken a short position in Nebius at $211.77 per share, alongside a similar wager against Oracle at $144.63. Burry's public framing of the trade as "fish in a barrel" — and his timing, just days before Nebius's second-quarter earnings release on August 12 — has turned the upcoming report into a referendum on the company's valuation. His core thesis: AI infrastructure players are inflating their profits by depreciating their graphics processors too slowly. At Oracle, he argues, earnings could be overstated by 26 to 27 percent by 2028. The disclosure alone knocked Nebius shares down roughly 10 percent on August 6 to around $197, adding to a brutal stretch that saw the stock lose 31.1 percent in July.
The tension between Burry's bearishness and Nebius's operational momentum could hardly be starker. In the first quarter of 2026, revenue surged to $399 million — a 684 percent jump from the $50 million posted a year earlier. The core AI infrastructure business grew even faster, up 841 percent to $390 million, while adjusted EBITDA reached $129.5 million on a 32 percent margin. The bottom line, however, told a different story: a net loss of $100.3 million. The company has been spending aggressively to feed that growth, pouring $2.5 billion into graphics processors in Q1 alone and raising its full-year capex guidance to $20–25 billion, up from a prior range of $16–20 billion. Cash reserves stood at $9.3 billion at the end of the quarter, bolstered by $6.3 billion in fresh capital — including a $2 billion investment from Nvidia — and an additional $775 million in debt financing secured in July.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Nebius?
Capacity plans have been revised upward with equal ambition. Nebius now targets over 4 gigawatts of power capacity, up from an earlier 1-gigawatt forecast, with a five-year contract with Meta potentially worth up to $27 billion serving as a key growth driver. In Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, the company is developing the Highridge Business Park campus across roughly 600 hectares, with a planned ultimate capacity of 1.2 gigawatts. The first 260-megawatt phase is slated to come online by October 2027, powered through an agreement with PPL Electric Utilities. A one-year moratorium on new large data centers in New York state has been flagged as a regulatory headwind — though some market commentators read it as evidence that demand for AI infrastructure is so intense it simply migrates to more welcoming markets.
The analyst community remains conspicuously divided. DA Davidson cut its price target from $250 to $175 on August 6, keeping a "Neutral" rating. Piper Sandler initiated coverage three days earlier, also at "Neutral," with a $224 price target — praising the capital-light scaling model, the proprietary server infrastructure, and the so-called Token Factory, while explicitly warning that the Vineland data center poses a near-term risk to forecasts. Adding to the cautious tone, director John Wilson Boynton IV sold roughly $1.5 million worth of shares on June 15. Insider sales are hardly a red flag on their own, but they fit a pattern of prudence rather than exuberance.
The numbers due on August 12 will test both narratives. Consensus expectations call for Q2 revenue of $574.65 million and a loss of $0.53 per share, though the secondary source puts the revenue estimate slightly higher at $578 million with a loss of $0.52. To hit the midpoint of management's own full-year guidance of $3.0–3.4 billion, Nebius would need to average roughly $934 million in quarterly revenue across the remaining three quarters — a leap that underscores just how much growth must be compressed into the second half of the year. The valuation math is equally demanding: on expected revenues, the stock trades at roughly 14 times forward sales, versus a sector average of 3.3 times, and around 55 times trailing twelve-month revenue.
The stock's technical position reflects the broader unease. Shares remain 37.72 percent below the 52-week high reached in June, though they are still up 121.17 percent year-to-date. The relative strength index sits at 45.4, with the price below its 50-day moving average. A strong print that confirms the raised capacity and revenue guidance could blunt Burry's argument; wider-than-expected losses would likely reignite the debate over whether AI infrastructure valuations have run ahead of reality. Either way, the August 12 report is shaping up as the moment when Nebius's two parallel realities — a business scaling at breakneck speed and a stock under intense short-selling pressure — finally converge.
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