What Turned a Yandex Castoff Into an AI Giant?Nebius Group N.V. Class ABATS:NBISUDIS_ViewNebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS) emerged from the mid-2024 breakup of Russian parent Yandex and re-domiciled to Amsterdam to shed its geopolitical baggage. Today it runs as a pure-play AI cloud provider, expanding infrastructure across Europe, the US, and Israel. The split left it with 1,300 engineers who had operated GPU clusters at scale for years. The stock recently hit record highs near $298, a 212% year-to-date surge. With $3.68 billion in cash, the company is deploying GPUs aggressively worldwide. Israel even selected Nebius to build its national AI supercomputer, cementing its role as a sovereign AI partner. The real bottleneck in AI is not chip supply but power grid capacity. Nebius bypasses that constraint by buying rural land and power, targeting 3 gigawatts of contracted power for 2026. It also signed a $2.6 billion fuel cell agreement with Bloom Energy to secure independent clean power. On the demand side, Q1 2026 revenue surged 684% year-over-year to $399 million. Its order book includes a $17.4 billion Microsoft deal and an expanded Meta agreement worth up to $27 billion. NVIDIA backed the story directly with a $2 billion investment. Beyond the core cloud, Nebius holds valuable private assets that traditional metrics miss. These include stakes in ClickHouse, the autonomous-vehicle venture Avride, data-annotation firm Toloka, and EdTech platform TripleTen. A patent portfolio of roughly 506 grants shields its server architecture and cluster optimization tools from rivals. Recent acquisitions of Eigen AI and Tavily strengthen its inference and AI search capabilities. Inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 adds a steady technical tailwind. The risks remain real. Massive capital needs point to weak free cash flow during the buildout phase, while high customer concentration exposes revenue to volatility. The company must also remediate internal control weaknesses tied to fixed-asset accounting and EdTech revenue recognition by late 2026. The open question is whether Nebius can convert its enormous backlog into durable profitability before the market fully prices in the opportunity.