For investors seeking pure-play exposure to AI infrastructure after the recent bout of profit-taking in the sector, CoreWeave and Nebius are two of the leading pure-play listed options.
Both rent Nvidia GPU capacity to AI labs and enterprises, both are scaling at a rate of knots, and both count Nvidia as a shareholder. But they are built and funded differently, and that will matter in the coming years.
CoreWeave (Nasdaq: CRWV), listed since March 2025, is a focused AI hyperscaler. CoreWeave describes itself as ‘The Essential Cloud for AI’. It sells GPU compute on usage-based and committed contracts, wrapped in storage, networking and software. This is a capital-hungry, debt-financed, single-purpose model.
Nebius (Nasdaq: NBIS), the Amsterdam-based group led by Arkady Volozh and carved out of the former Yandex, is structurally different in that it offers an end-to-end AI stack with developer services.
Its core AI cloud business is 98% of revenue, but the wider entity also holds stakes in Toloka, Avride, TripleTen and ClickHouse.
There is a significant difference in revenue generation. CoreWeave posted Q1 revenue of $2,078m, up 112%, with a $99.4bn backlog. Nebius reported group revenue of $399m, up 684%, with core AI run-rate revenue of $1.9bn, roughly a fifth of CoreWeave’s revenue.
But profitability sets them apart. CoreWeave reported a $740m net loss and adjusted EBITDA of $1,157m (56% margin), but adjusted operating income of just $21m after accounting for $536m of net interest.
CoreWeave is heavily funded by debt – a risk analysts have highlighted- and is probably the reason for its much lower price-to-sales ratio than Nebius.
Nebius is less geared. Group adjusted EBITDA was $130m in Q1(32% margin), core AI margin up to 45%, and net income of $621m, though that leans on a non-cash gain on its ClickHouse stake.
Nebius closed the quarter with $9.3bn cash. CoreWeave converts more to cash EBITDA but carries heavy debt. Nebius is smaller but better capitalised.
Both rely on bg deals with the world’s leading tech firms. CoreWeave signed a $21bn commitment with Meta in March, plus a multi-year deal with Anthropic.
Nebius’s headline win is a Microsoft GPU agreement worth up to $19.4bn, alongside a $27bn Meta partnership.
NVIDIA has invested $2bn in each of them.
CoreWeave is the most established incumbent, with vast backlog but a debt load that is weighing on its profitability. Nebius is the nimbler, better-funded challenger with a diversified structure that is favoured by the market at this point in time.
Interestingly, they have similar market caps despite widely different top lines.
CoreWeave is 36% higher year-to-date. But Nebius, one of the UK Investor Magazine’s Top Picks for 2026, is 188% higher so far in 2026.
Both are leveraged bets that compute demand will keep outrunning supply. Both are likely to receive additional large-scale compute deals.