Nebius raises B300 rental to $9.50/hr Oct. 1

Nebius pushed through its first hike of the year in early May, when its pricing page showed the H100 at $2.95 per hour and the B300 at $6.10. After Oct. 1, those same chips will cost $4.50 and $9.50 — roughly 53% and 56% higher than five months earlier. The second-quarter shareholder letter had already reported over 30% higher pricing for older-generation GPUs versus the first quarter, and CFO Dado Alonso said on the August earnings call that Nebius sold out of capacity as fast as it brought it online. That is the context for a price increase from a company that is spending heavily to add capacity: raising rates while building is unusual unless demand is outrunning supply.

The Oct. 1 move touches a smaller share of Nebius' business than the headline rates imply. Reserved-capacity contracts are priced when signed, so roughly $37.5 billion in remaining performance obligations at the end of June are not repriced. The increase functions more as a benchmark for capacity Nebius has not yet sold. The trend in that benchmark is steep: annual contract value per megawatt went from a 2026 base of around $12 million to over $20 million on deals closed in the second quarter, with short-term deals seen at $40 million to $50 million per megawatt and the first of those signed in the third quarter. Profitability has moved with those prices — the AI cloud business's non-GAAP EBITDA margin almost doubled from the fourth quarter of 2025 to 45% in the first quarter, then widened to around 50% in the second.

Whether the pricing holds is the open question. If supply catches up while Nebius and its rivals keep building, hourly rates could drop as fast as they rose. The build-out is being funded partly by $5.75 billion in convertible notes sold in August and around $2.8 billion in new shares sold through June, and shorter payback — about one year and 10 months on second-quarter deals, down from two to three years earlier — makes each new megawatt depend less on outside funding. With shares around $243, a valuation above $65 billion and more than 20 times sales at the midpoint of management's 2026 revenue guidance, the market appears to be treating today's pricing as durable well into 2027, which is a bet the shortage persists.