Forget CoreWeave — This Is the AI Stock You Should Instead Be Buying

Omor Ibne Ehsan

Mon, August 24, 2026 at 8:31 PM GMT+3 4 min read

Quick Read

Nebius (NBIS) mirrors CoreWeave (CRWV) as a neocloud but holds $8 billion cash, near-zero debt, and delivered 454% revenue growth last quarter.
Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta (META) anchor Nebius with contracts potentially worth $19 billion and $27 billion, backed by a $4 billion NVIDIA strategic stake.
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CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV) is the AI infrastructure name everyone is talking about after Q2 revenue of $2.575 billion and its recent selection for inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 Index.

SK hynix

But the more interesting setup in the neocloud space sits one ticker over, with a cleaner balance sheet and the same hyperscaler validation driving CoreWeave's story.

Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS) is the same neocloud thesis with a far cleaner balance sheet, validated by the same hyperscalers that underpin CoreWeave's story, and priced earlier in the arc. The retirement investor who is tired of chasing headlines has good reason to look closely at Nebius before piling into the more crowded name.

Crowded, Levered, and Losing More Every Quarter

CoreWeave's growth is real, but the economics underneath keep deteriorating. Q2 net loss widened to $626 million from $290 million a year earlier, and adjusted operating margin compressed to 5% from 16%.

Debt is doing the heavy lifting here. Interest expense reached $640 million in Q2; management guided Q3 interest expense to $860 to $940 million, and debt-to-equity is 8.94.

Full-year 2026 capex guidance was raised to $35 to $39 billion, and Q2 alone burned $5.74 billion of free cash flow. This is a business that must tap capital markets continuously to keep delivering contracted revenue.

Investors also carry legal overhang from a securities fraud class action alleging concealed data center construction delays, and the shares are down 1.92% over the past year despite the AI mania. The consensus is already in the stock.

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Microsoft, Meta, and NVIDIA Are Building Nebius Up

Nebius carries the same hyperscaler stamp that CoreWeave earns its multiple on, and, in some ways, a stronger one. Its Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) contract is worth roughly $17.4 billion and could expand to $19.4 billion, and a second Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) arrangement could reach $27 billion if all available capacity is purchased.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) has gone well beyond supplier status, committing a $2 billion strategic equity investment plus $2 billion of pre-funded warrants, a rare vote of confidence in a neocloud still scaling.

The operating results back the validation. Q2 revenue rose 454% year over year to $582.3 million, group adjusted EBITDA margin hit 41%, and remaining performance obligations reached $37.5 billion.

CEO Arkady Volozh told investors that "We could sell today our entire 2027 capacity on these terms if we wanted to. But we are not doing this," because Nebius is deliberately holding capacity back for shorter-duration contracts priced at $40 million to $50 million per megawatt. That is pricing power CoreWeave has not demonstrated.

Cleaner Balance Sheet, Earlier in the Story

The financial contrast is what should really matter to a retirement investor. Nebius ended Q2 with $8.04 billion in cash, generated $4.5 billion of operating cash flow in the first half, and said it has almost no corporate-level debt.

Customer prepayments accompanied roughly 70% of Q2 deals and are expected to provide more than $9 billion of upfront funding during 2026. CoreWeave, by comparison, must raise external capital every quarter to plug the hole its own contracts create.

The risks are real and worth naming. Three customers each account for more than 10% of revenue; convertible debt has a value of $8.5 billion and a fair value of $20.8 billion; and losses will continue as the company builds toward its $3 billion to $3.4 billion 2026 revenue guide.

NBIS Price Target — 24/7 Wall St.

None of that changes the setup. The research case for Nebius is worth working through before the same institutional desks that just discovered CoreWeave notice the cleaner version sitting next to it, and the broader buildout story reaches beyond either name (we profiled seven suppliers powering the AI data-center boom, from power to networking, in a free report here: 7 Stocks Powering the AI Boom).