Amid the neocloud sell-off, Nebius says customers are still paying more for AI compute
The market is doubting the business model of the AI companies that rent out computing power, but Nebius's chief revenue officer tells CNBC that prices are rising faster than expected. The question investors are debating this week is whether that pricing power can outweigh the debt loads now spooking the stock market.
The sell-off that set the agenda
October has been brutal for the so-called neoclouds — companies that build GPU-filled data centers and rent the capacity to AI developers. Motley Fool wrote on October 19 that Nebius stock was trading around $165, roughly 40 percent below its June record, and that most of the decline had come recently — the stock fell around 30 percent in October alone, with no company-specific news as the trigger. CoreWeave fell roughly as much over the period.
According to Yahoo Finance, which reports that South Korea's Elice fell 32 percent on its first trading day, October 20, the market sharpened its focus on the neocloud sector in the past week after a viral chart of rising bond yields at CoreWeave — which is backed by Nvidia. The chart underscored concerns about the company's debt-heavy balance sheet and whether it can scale fast enough to cover rising interest costs.
The market's verdict, in other words, is not a lack of demand for computing power, but the financing model itself: the companies have borrowed massively to build, and the credit market is beginning to price in the risk.
Nebius's counterargument
In the middle of this sell-off, Nebius came out with a counteroffer. The company's chief revenue officer, Marc Boroditsky, told CNBC on Wednesday that the company is seeing AI compute prices rise more than expected — "We're seeing continued upward mobility in terms of the kind of price per megawatt," as he put it.
The statement rests on a concrete example: Nebius held a capacity auction on the Tuesday before the interview, and Boroditsky said the auction showed continued price increases. According to 24/7 Wall St., the company's first capacity auction cleared 15 percent above the highest price Nebius had ever charged — meaning customers are still paying more, not less, for access.
Boroditsky also drew a sharp line to CoreWeave. Nebius is not in the same position, he said, because "we're not carrying the kind of debt that they are."
The debt wrinkle in Nebius's story
But that distinction is not straightforward. The same 24/7 Wall St. analysis that cites Nebius's positive figures estimates that the company carries around $12.1 billion in future lease obligations. That sits in some tension with Boroditsky's statement that the company is not carrying CoreWeave-like debt.
The contradiction comes down to accounting technique: lease obligations are treated differently from loans on the balance sheet, and where the line between "low debt" and "high debt" falls depends on whether you count the leases. The sources do not resolve this question — and it is worth noting that CoreWeave, according to 24/7 Wall St., has guided for Q3 interest expense of $860–940 million. Those are the kinds of numbers that make the bond market nervous, and that make the definitional question about Nebius's lease obligations more than a technicality.
Corroborating points from Crusoe and SpaceX
Nebius is not alone in the price story. Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmeller told CNBC that prices on older Nvidia chips are above their original levels: "We're seeing higher pricing today for A100s than we saw in 2020 or 2021. We're seeing higher pricing for H100s than what we saw when they were first deployed in 2023," he said.
This is an interesting statement, because it contradicts the common assumption that GPUs lose value fastest as new models launch. If older chips like the A100 (launched in 2020) and H100 (2023) are actually fetching higher rental prices today than at launch, it suggests demand for AI compute is still outrunning supply.
The strongest jolt, though, came from SpaceX. According to CNBC's reporting, Nebius stock rose on Wednesday after SpaceX disclosed that its AI business revenue had grown ninefold to $7.56 billion. SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen said prices are "currently tracking slightly above the high end of the $30 to $50 per watt range."
What is verifiable — and what is not
This is where readers should pay attention. Nearly all of the price-positive evidence in this story comes from the companies themselves:
- Boroditsky's statements about rising price per megawatt and the auction result are company claims made in a CNBC interview. The 15 percent figure from the first auction comes from Nebius management, as reported by 24/7 Wall St.
- Lochmeller's comments on A100 and H100 prices are a competitor's observations, not market data from an independent source.
- SpaceX is a private company. The $7.56 billion figure and the per-watt price level cannot be checked against public filings — they are CFO statements as reported by CNBC.
None of these figures can currently be contradicted, but none of them can be verified against balance sheets or independent market data either. It is also worth noting the timing: the most price-positive statements came precisely in the week when the market is questioning the entire industry model — that is not necessarily a sign they are wrong, but it is context worth keeping in mind.
The open question
The bull case for neocloud stocks rests in practice on one claim: that compute prices are rising fast enough to service the debt funding the build-out. This week produced three different actors — Nebius, Crusoe and SpaceX — offering three company-generated data points that prices are moving upward. All were made by the companies' own executives, relayed through the same CNBC reporting, and none have been confirmed by independent sources.
But the sell-off in the stocks and bonds is about something else: interest costs and debt service, as Nebius's own roughly $12.1 billion in lease obligations serves to remind. Whether pricing power can outrun financing costs remains an open question — and for now, it is the answer the market is waiting for, not the price statements alone, that will determine whether October's sell-off was an overreaction or a warning.