Nebius opens its AI cloud stack to partners under a new asset-light business model

Nebius introduced a new asset-light business model on July 15 that lets infrastructure partners deploy its full-stack AI cloud platform inside their own data centers.

Under the arrangement, partners finance, own and operate the physical infrastructure, while Nebius supplies the systems architecture, hardware design, software stack and ongoing maintenance, and sells the resulting capacity through its own global sales organization, Nebius said. The structure keeps the capital cost of building data centers on partners’ balance sheets rather than Nebius’s.

The model lets partners “reach a much wider customer base with much better margins than conventional wholesale bare-metal contracts,” founder and Chief Executive Arkady Volozh said.

Nebius is targeting data center developers, infrastructure investors, regional operators and national AI projects worldwide, offering revenue-sharing, licensing, commission and committed-capacity arrangements. The pitch is aimed at operators that have land, power and capital but lack an AI-cloud software layer to sell.

The approach is a bet that demand for AI compute is outrunning what any single provider can build alone, and that partners will pay to license a ready-made stack rather than assemble one. Its success depends on named operators signing up; Nebius did not disclose initial partners.