Nebius — GPU Rents Are Rising Again, and Where a Neocloud Sits on the Cloud Cash Flow Map
One-year H100 contract rates are 40% above the trough and on-demand capacity is sold out. With cloud backlogs swelling at the same time, this is the ledger of a business whose rental rate is its unit price of revenue.
GPU rental rates 40% above the trough have changed how both cloud providers and GPU landlords are read. The assumption that contracts struck in the cheap period will renew at one and a half to two times the rate — speeding cash recovery on the same equipment — is taking hold. Nebius has its unit price tied directly to rental rates, its 2026 component costs locked at 2025 prices, and much of its equipment funding supplied by customer prepayment. Selling price, input cost and funding are aligned in the same direction.
Reader's Brief — 30-second TL;DR
Advanced
Why Now
One-year H100 contract rates rose roughly 40%, from $1.70 an hour in October 2025 to $2.35 in March 2026, with on-demand sold out across tiers. Latest-quarter cloud growth reaccelerated to +93% at Oracle infrastructure, +82% at Google Cloud, +43% at Azure and +37% at AWS, while backlogs reached $678 billion at Microsoft (+84%) and $638 billion at Oracle (+363%). Nebius first-quarter operating cash flow was $2,258 million, 5.7 times revenue.
Winners ?? Losers
Beneficiaries: GPU landlords selling residual capacity at new rates, Nebius, NVIDIA (holder of a 9.3% stake), and the power and data center construction chain. Pressures: diverging funding conditions (Oracle five-year CDS at 214 basis points, an S&P cut to BBB-), double exposure to Meta alongside reports of its cloud ambitions, the NVIDIA lock-up expiry on 11 September, the mismatch that turns prepayment back into a service obligation if commissioning slips, and the 2026-2028 maturity window for GPU-backed debt.
Watch For
Reading depth
Rental Rates Have Started Rising Again
The price of compute has bottomed turned.
Through 2024 and 2025 the GPU rental market was oversupplied. Renting a single NVIDIA H100 on a one-year contract once cost around $8 an hour; as supply piled in, the rate collapsed to $1 to $2. Amazon cut the price of the relevant instances by 44% in June 2025. Even at those prices, capacity went unsold.
The turn began in October 2025. One-year contract rates bottomed that month at $1.70 an hour and reached $2.35 by March 2026. Roughly 40% in five months. Over the same stretch on-demand capacity moved to sold out across effectively every GPU tier, compounded by tenants refusing to hand secured capacity back to the shared pool.
When price and inventory turn together, the character of the market changes. A market where buyers set the price has become one where sellers do.
Why this matters is straightforward. For anyone renting out compute, the rental rate is the unit price of . And the books of the large cloud providers still carry contracts struck during the cheap period. If those contracts reach expiry and are rewritten at today's rates, the coming off the same equipment changes. Part of the market has begun rebuilding its free flow math around renewal rates of one and a half to two times the old ones. That is an assumption, not a confirmed result. But it is plainly what has made investors look again at cloud providers and GPU landlords together.
The direction of rental rates has changed, and that is where reading this cycle begins.
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