UK investors have been aggressively buying little-known Nasdaq growth stock Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS). Last week, it was among the top-10 most bought stocks on AJ Bell.

Is there an opportunity here? Let’s discuss.

What is Nebius?

Nebius is a European ‘neocloud’ company that specialises in data centres for the AI era. Unlike traditional data centres, which were built for general purpose computing, its data centres – which are stacked with Nvidia GPUs – are specifically designed to handle the massive compute requirements of AI.

It’s not only a neocloud provider however. Nebius also owns, or has large stakes, in a number of other tech businesses including autonomous driving company Avride (which has completed 60,000 rides on Uber) and data businesses Toloka and Clickhouse. So it’s far more than just a pure-play cloud provider.

A high-risk/high-reward AI stock?

From a high-risk/high-reward perspective, Nebius looks quite interesting to me. For a start, the company has partnerships with some major tech companies. One is Meta, and the two companies have a compute deal worth up to $27bn.

Another is Palantir. Via this partnership, Palantir acts as a distribution channel – bringing its customers onto the Nebius platform.

Nebius also has a major partnership with Nvidia. It’s worth noting here that Nvidia recently said that Nebius will be the first early adopter of its new AI inference platform Groq 3 LPX.

Revenue’s projected to surge

Second, revenue growth projections are mind blowing. Next year, revenue is forecast to hit $12.2bn versus $530m in 2025.

Now, the 2026 and 2027 figures are just estimates, but that’s some prolific growth forecasts from Wall Street.

Share price weakness

Another attraction is that the share price has fallen significantly more recently. Near $300 in June, it’s now at $170.

Note that the market-cap is about $45bn at present. Taking that 2027 sales forecast, we get a price-to-sales ratio of 3.7, which is quite low.

Some huge risks

So there’s a lot to like here. But as I said earlier, this is a high-risk stock.

One major risk is interest rates. Recently, Nebius’ total debt has jumped to around $10bn, so higher rates could present some challenges.

Note that a large proportion of Nebius’ debt is convertible notes with a $313-$325 conversion window. If the stock fails to hit this threshold, investors will demand cash repayment at maturity rather than converting the loan to shares, forcing Nebius to face massive cash outlays or refinance into a high-rate corporate bond market.

Looking beyond debt and interest rates, there’s also significant business model risk. Recently, Gartner projected that over 80% of independent specialised cloud providers will cease separate operations by 2030, due to immense cost pressures and capital expenditure deficits.

My move now

Given the risks, I’m not a buyer of Nebius stock yet. I want to do a little more research and see how its near-term earnings reports look. So I’m going to keep it on my watchlist though, because it certainly does look interesting.

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Edward Sheldon owns shares in Nvidia, Uber, Palantir, and Nasdaq.