AI cloud company Nebius Group said on Thursday, October 22, that it has secured a 3.5 billion dollar senior secured financing facility from Citi, adding a large pool of near-term capital to fund data center development and graphics processor purchases as it races to expand capacity.
The Amsterdam-headquartered company, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker NBIS, said the proceeds will be used for data center development and GPU procurement, as well as for general corporate purposes. Citi acted as mandated lead arranger, agent and security agent on the deal.
The terms underline that this is bridge-style financing rather than long-term debt. The facility matures in just 364 days, and it initially bears interest at Term SOFR plus 2.75 percent per annum, rising to a maximum of 3.50 percent per annum, subject to other adjustments. Nebius will therefore need to repay or refinance the borrowing within a year, a structure that only works if the company can keep converting its order book into longer-term funding on schedule.
Chief Operating Officer Ophir Nave presented the short maturity as a deliberate choice rather than a constraint. "Sequencing our financing is how we optimize our long-term cost of capital," Nave said. "This facility provides additional financing to support our near-term capacity build-out. We still have a range of capital sources available to us to finance the next phase of growth, including asset-backed financing based on investment-grade customer commitments of more than 40 billion dollars of long-term contracts."
Nebius said the facility complements a funding base that already includes customer prepayments and operating cash flows, and that it gives the company flexibility over the timing and structure of further external capital-raising as it continues its global build-out, including growth planned for 2027 and beyond. Nave credited what he called a disciplined approach to managing the balance sheet, saying the deal demonstrates the company's ability to choose when and how it raises capital.
The timing matters. As Reuters noted in reporting the deal, the announcement lands against the backdrop of a sell-off in AI infrastructure shares last week, after bonds issued by rival CoreWeave fell sharply in value. Nebius and CoreWeave are usually grouped together as the leading "neocloud" firms, the new class of cloud providers building data centers specialized for AI workloads rather than general-purpose computing. In that market, access to billions of dollars of financing on acceptable terms has become a competitive weapon in its own right, alongside access to scarce GPUs and power.
Nebius describes itself as building a full-stack platform for developers and companies, spanning data and model training through to production deployment, and serving startups and enterprises building AI products, agents and services worldwide. Its infrastructure footprint includes its own data center in Finland and colocation deployments in cities including Paris and Kansas City.
For enterprise IT buyers, the deal is another sign that the AI cloud market's center of gravity is shifting from who can announce capacity to who can finance it. A 364-day clock is now running on 3.5 billion dollars of that capacity, and how Nebius refinances it — against more than 40 billion dollars of long-term customer contracts, by its own account — will say a great deal about how durable the neocloud model really is.