Nebius takes $3.5 billion Citi bridge loan, adding to its debt

Nebius has secured a $3.5 billion loan from Citi to keep buying AI chips and building data centers. The company said the loan gives it flexibility over the timing and structure of longer-term financing. The Amsterdam-based cloud company announced the deal Thursday.

It is Nebius’s fifth major financing of 2026, bringing the total raised this year, including share sales, to at least $17.2 billion.

The money is available for data center development, graphics processing units and general corporate needs. Nebius pays for equipment and construction before much of the revenue from its Microsoft and Meta contracts arrives. It spent about $2.5 billion on capital projects in the first quarter and about $5.7 billion in the second, mostly on GPUs and data center expansion.

“This facility provides additional financing to support our near-term capacity build-out,” Nebius Chief Operating Officer Ophir Nave said in the company’s announcement.

Nebius signed the agreement Oct. 17 with Citibank, N.A., according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing describes it as a bridge facility. The company’s announcement omits the word “bridge.” It matures Oct. 16, 2027. Nebius can repay it early without a penalty.

The interest rate floats with Term SOFR, a benchmark used for business loans. Citi charges 2.75 percentage points above that benchmark at first. The added charge rises by a quarter point every 90 days, topping out at 3.5 points above SOFR, subject to other adjustments. If the benchmark stays flat, the loan gets more expensive the longer Nebius keeps it.

Citi also has security if Nebius fails to meet its obligations. The parent company and its U.S. and Dutch borrowing subsidiaries pledged substantially all their assets, with stated exceptions, including the parent’s shares in those subsidiaries. The agreement requires Nebius to maintain a minimum amount of liquidity. The filing does not give the threshold.

Nebius could repay the loan from cash, replace it with longer-term debt, or use another source of capital. The company has not said which course it will take. The filing also does not specify how much of the facility has been drawn or assign proceeds to individual campuses.

In July, Nebius arranged a roughly $775 million secured loan backed by deployed GPUs and cash flows from one customer agreement. That loan runs until 2030 and was priced at SOFR plus 2.5 points. The Citi facility is larger, shorter and backed by a broader pool of assets. Nebius also sold about $10.1 billion of convertible notes in March and August and raised about $2.8 billion from share sales through June 30. In May, Nebius said it planned to begin raising “mid-single digits billions of dollars in the near term” through debt.

Nebius reported about $8 billion in cash at the end of June and said it expected more than $9 billion of customer prepayments during 2026. It said roughly 70 percent of deals signed in the second quarter included prepayments covering 50 percent to 60 percent of related capital spending. Those payments reduce the amount Nebius must finance itself and obligate it to deliver the contracted capacity.

Nave listed asset-backed financing based on “investment-grade customer commitments of more than $40 billion of long-term contracts” among the capital sources he said remain available. In its August shareholder letter, Nebius described its total customer commitments as more than $40 billion.

In Vineland, New Jersey, DataOne is developing a data center for Nebius tied to its Microsoft agreement. Nebius said in August that it had delivered all capacity tranches to Microsoft under the contract. Phase 2 includes a 587,980-square-foot expansion of the data center building, which city planning records list as under construction, along with Bloom power areas and a liquefied natural gas tank and filling station.

In Independence, Missouri, Nebius broke ground in May on a campus it says could reach 1.2 gigawatts. The company expects initial utility power in the second half of 2026, with further supply subject to study. Nebius announced the City Council’s approval of a Chapter 100 incentive plan for the project March 3.

Nebius also says it secured land and power for an owned Pennsylvania campus designed for up to 1.2 gigawatts. Its project page puts the first 260-megawatt phase in October 2027. The company lists an Alabama site in planning and signed colocation capacity in Oklahoma and Minnesota. A Kansas City cloud region is already operating. The sites range from operating to planning.

Nebius rents computing infrastructure to customers. In September, Palantir named Nebius its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner, giving eligible Palantir commercial customers access to Nebius computing. Meta’s March agreement calls for $12 billion of dedicated capacity beginning in early 2027 and a commitment to buy up to $15 billion of capacity Nebius does not sell to other customers.

Across its sites worldwide, Nebius aims to have five gigawatts of contracted power by year-end and says it plans to deploy more than one gigawatt a year starting in 2027. Nebius defines contracted power as capacity secured by contracted land and power commitments.

The next checkpoints are the first power and computing deliveries at its U.S. campuses, the financing chosen to replace or repay the Citi loan, and Nebius’s next disclosure of cash and capital spending. The bridge expires in October 2027.