Nebius Group, the Amsterdam-listed AI cloud operator, told shareholders on 12 August that it raised $775m in July in its first secured debt financing, priced at SOFR plus 2.50% (the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, the dollar benchmark that replaced Libor). The company's own wording is worth keeping intact: the vehicle is "backed by deployed GPU infrastructure and contracted cash flows from an agreement with an investment-grade customer"1. Nebius does not name the customer, and names no lender, no arranger and no maturity date either. A lender's claim on repayment therefore rests on hardware and a contract that nobody outside Nebius can independently verify.
The qualification comes out of the same filing cabinet. Nebius's annual report for 2025, filed on 30 April, states that its "controls related to fixed assets were not adequately designed and were not operating effectively", specifically over depreciation start dates and "timely reconciliation around the asset count process", and that in consequence the company "were not able to rely on certain data and reports used in the accounting for fixed assets, including server and network equipment"2. Its auditor, Reanda Audit & Assurance B.V. of Amsterdam, gave an unqualified opinion on the financial statements and an adverse opinion on internal control over financial reporting (ICFR, the formal assessment of whether a company's accounting controls actually work). Reanda did not qualify the numbers; it found the process that produced them ineffective.
Keep the finding at its real size. The weakness runs to when depreciation begins and whether the asset register can be relied on, not to capitalisation policy, valuation or impairment. Reanda attributes the judgement risk to "the rapid expansion of GPU-based server infrastructure, data center facilities, and related equipment"3. It was unremediated at filing, with Nebius targeting the end of 2026 and stating it "cannot assure you" of that. Foreign issuers assess ICFR annually rather than quarterly, so 30 April remains the last word on record and the August results do not revisit it.
Two further layers fund the build. Roughly 70% of deals closed in the quarter carried prepayments covering 50-60% of the associated capital cost, a share counted by deal number rather than by value or capacity, and Nebius expects over $9bn of prepayments across 2026, an expectation rather than a contracted sum4. On 11 March 2026 the company sold Nvidia a pre-funded warrant over 21,065,396 Class A shares for roughly $2.0bn at an exercise price of $0.0001, with proceeds earmarked in part for "the development and construction of greenfield data centers"5. The supplier funds the buildings, the customers pay the capital cost before it is spent, and the hardware that results secures the loan.
Q2 revenue reached $582.3m, up 454% year on year, against capital expenditure of $5.7bn, and contracted power guidance rose to 5 GW by year-end from 4 GW in May6. Nebius says Q2 terms cut the expected payback period on those deals to one year and ten months, from a historical two to three years; that figure is the company's own non-GAAP estimate (not calculated under standard accounting rules), built on its own forecast costs and explicitly including capacity not yet built7. The filing says only that capacity was added in the UK, Estonia and Finland. DataCenterDynamics supplies the granularity: a second Mäntsälä site of up to 70 MW from 2027, taking Finland to 455 MW across three sites, and 22 MW at Hüüru west of Tallinn with Greenergy Data Centers8. Dublin held 15% of west European capacity against London's 39% when we last measured that drift, and the Nordic and Baltic pull has not slackened. A developer accepting a British grid offer would now face Ofgem's proposed per-megawatt deposit. Money of the kind raised in July is what buys past terms like that.
