Nebius Stock Jumps as BNP Paribas Nearly Doubles Its Price Target

Nebius Group shares jumped roughly 8-9% Thursday after BNP Paribas Exane analyst Stefan Slowinski upgraded the AI infrastructure company to Outperform from Neutral and nearly doubled his price target, lifting it to $399 from $260.

That is the kind of price-target move that gets a stock talked about on trading desks. The new target implies as much as 64% upside from where shares traded before the call.

It landed on a day when the broader market was still digesting a bumpy September for AI-adjacent names, with rate uncertainty and stretched valuations both weighing on sentiment.

Slowinski's thesis centers on capacity and pricing. Nebius, which rents out Nvidia and AMD chips for AI training and inference, has reportedly sold out its available compute as fast as it comes online.

Starting October 1, the company is raising prices on select Nvidia GPU instances by roughly 17% to 21%, with some AMD EPYC Genoa CPU rates climbing about 25% too. It's the second such hike this year.

The fundamentals back that pricing power up. Nebius posted group revenue of $582 million last quarter, up 454% year-over-year, with its core AI business alone generating $575 million, up 514%.

That figure was first reported on GuruFocus and independently confirmed via MarketBeat's coverage of the same BNP Paribas note. Annualized run-rate revenue hit $3 billion by the end of June.

The company said during its Q2 call that it had effectively sold out of capacity as quickly as new capacity came online, a supply constraint that supports the case for further price hikes ahead.

BNP Paribas believes Nebius could approach $22 billion in annual recurring revenue exiting 2027, calling its outlook "meaningfully improved" since initiating coverage in June.

Here's the stock-specific case: Nebius secured a major long-term cloud contract from Meta back in March, and Slowinski thinks 2027 guidance could "materially reset" Street estimates even higher.

If you're already in NBIS, this is the bull thesis in one line: capacity constraints plus rising prices equals expanding margins as revenue scales.

But don't treat one price target as gospel. Wall Street is split wide open on this name right now.

Truist just initiated coverage at Buy with a $355 target, and Northland reiterated Outperform at $410. Rothschild and Co. Redburn took the other side entirely, slapping a Sell rating and an $84 target on the stock days earlier.

Redburn cited pressure on GPU pricing across the sector as competitors like CoreWeave chase the same Nvidia allocation and hyperscaler customers. Average analyst targets across the Street sit closer to $283, well below Slowinski's number.

That spread, from $84 to $410, tells you this is a high-conviction, high-disagreement stock, not a consensus slow-and-steady name.

Nebius shares are already up roughly 191% year-to-date, so a lot of good news is arguably priced in even after Thursday's pop. Seven of nine analysts covering the stock rate it Buy or higher, one rates it Hold, and one rates it Sell.

For retail investors eyeing an entry, the smarter approach is scaling in rather than chasing the gap up. Watch the October 1 price hikes for early signs of customer pushback or churn.

If enterprise clients absorb the increases without slowing consumption, that validates the bull case fast. If usage growth stalls, the bear case gets louder in a hurry.

Risk here is not small: this is a capital-intensive, GPU-dependent business in a sector where sentiment can flip in a single earnings call.

The Redburn Sell rating is a reminder that not everyone buys the AI-infrastructure story at these multiples, and retail investors should size positions with that disagreement in mind.

Bottom line: Nebius has real revenue growth and real pricing power behind Thursday's rally, but with targets ranging from $84 to $410, this is a stock to size carefully, not one to bet the account on.