Nebius Stock: Why BNP Paribas Just Set a $399 Target

Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS) got a loud vote of confidence last week when BNP Paribas upgraded the AI cloud company to Outperform from Neutral and hiked its price target from $260 to $399. Shares popped 7.4% intraday on the news — and that's on top of a stock that's already more than doubled over the past year.

BNP Paribas's math implies roughly 64% upside from where Nebius was trading when the call came out. The firm's core argument: Nebius's outlook has "meaningfully improved" as demand for its AI cloud infrastructure keeps outrunning expectations.

The Amsterdam-based company builds GPU clusters and cloud infrastructure for AI developers, and it's been closing deals that back up the bullish case. It locked in a long-term cloud agreement with Meta Platforms back in March and is now building a $10 billion AI data center in Finland. That Finland site just validated its first full Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 rack, putting Nebius among the earliest cloud providers anywhere to hit that milestone.

The numbers behind the stock move are hard to ignore. Nebius posted its best commercial quarter yet in Q2, closing four landmark cloud deals averaging more than $1 billion in total contract value each. Revenue grew 454% year-over-year to $582.3 million, and adjusted EBITDA flipped from a $21 million loss to $236.2 million in earnings.

"Nebius could approach $22 billion in annual recurring revenue exiting 2027." — BNP Paribas analyst note

Here's the tension for investors weighing an entry: not everyone on Wall Street agrees. Rothschild & Co Redburn initiated coverage with a Sell rating and an $84 price target, warning that credit markets are starting to price risks in AI infrastructure names that equity investors are still largely ignoring. That's about as wide a gap as you'll see between two research desks on the same stock.

Nebius is also raising prices on its Nvidia and AMD GPU compute instances by roughly 20% starting October 1 — its second such hike this year. That's a bet that demand is strong enough to absorb higher pricing, likely aimed at staying competitive with rival CoreWeave while padding margins.

The stock isn't cheap by any traditional measure. Nebius trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio above 20x, compared with an industry average closer to 3.4x — a premium that only makes sense if the growth trajectory BNP Paribas is pricing in actually shows up in the numbers.

As of this week, shares sit around $232, down about 20% from their 52-week high of $299.86 hit back in June, even after the recent bounce. That pullback is exactly where the bull case gets interesting: if BNP Paribas's ARR targets are in the right zip code, the current price still leaves real room to run.

For retail investors, this is a high-conviction, high-volatility name. The catalyst to watch is Nebius's next earnings print and whether the October price hikes stick without denting deal volume — that's the real test of the pricing-power thesis analysts are betting on.

Bottom line: Nebius has bulls and bears making sharply different calls on the same set of facts, which usually means the stock keeps moving on every data point until one side is proven right.