On Monday, during after - hours trading, the U.S. - listed shares of Dutch AI infrastructure firm Nebius experienced a meteoric rise, surging by more than 60%. The company made public its five - year contract with Microsoft, valued at $17.4 billion. Under this agreement, Nebius will supply computing resources via its data center located in New Jersey, USA. Moreover, Microsoft has the option to acquire an additional $2 billion worth of service capacity. This would bring the overall contract value to around $19.4 billion. In the business world, such a substantial deal is a strong indicator. It highlights the ever - growing and intense demand for high - performance AI computing. Nebius primarily focuses on offering NVIDIA GPUs and AI cloud services. The CEO of Nebius remarked that this agreement is not merely a financial windfall. It is expected to act as a catalyst, significantly speeding up the expansion of the company's AI cloud business starting from 2026 and continuing into the future.