Nebius Lands $27 Billion Meta AI Deal, Boosting Vineland Data Center Prospects

Nebius Group already had one foot in Vineland before last week's announcement. Now, with a five-year, $27 billion AI infrastructure agreement signed with Meta Platforms, the Amsterdam-based company's New Jersey presence carries considerably more weight.

The deal, announced March 16, pairs $12 billion in dedicated compute capacity to be delivered across multiple locations starting in early 2027 with an option for Meta to purchase up to $15 billion more in available capacity across specific Nebius clusters over five years. It also includes one of the first large-scale deployments of Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform, a next-generation GPU architecture designed for demanding AI workloads.

Nebius CEO and founder Arkady Volozh said in the company's announcement: "We are pleased to expand our significant partnership with Meta as part of securing more large, long-term capacity contracts to accelerate the build-out and growth of our core AI cloud business. We will continue to deliver."

For Vineland, the agreement lands against an already-active backdrop. Nebius has an existing deployment in the city and, separately, was reported to have brokered a deal worth up to $19.4 billion to deliver GPU capacity to Microsoft for a new Vineland data center. The research notes that deal is distinct from the Meta agreement, though both flow through the same Nebius infrastructure pipeline. Whether any portion of the new $12 billion Meta commitment will be provisioned at the Vineland facility has not been confirmed; the agreement specifies delivery "across multiple locations" without naming sites.

The March 16 announcement came less than a week after Nvidia disclosed a $2 billion investment in Nebius, and it builds on a $3 billion deal Nebius had brokered with Meta the previous November. Nebius shares jumped roughly 14 to 15 percent on the news, according to National CIO Review and Aibusiness, though a CNBC price snapshot captured a smaller intraday move, reflecting normal timing differences across outlets.

Citi initiated coverage of Nebius the same day with a buy rating, citing what it described as a differentiated view on AI datacenter total addressable market growth, margin improvement, and capital-efficient scaling.

The broader financial context underscores what is at stake. Meta plans to spend between $115 billion and $135 billion this year on data centers, chips, and AI infrastructure. Nebius, which rebranded from Russian internet company Yandex after selling that search business and pivoting to AI cloud services, also announced plans last month to acquire Tavily, an agentic search provider, in a move aimed at combining real-time search infrastructure with its AI platform.

Nebius has indicated it intends to sell a portion of its cluster capacity to third-party customers, with the remainder reserved for Meta, a commercial structure that could shape how the Vineland facility is used going forward. Delivery on the Vera Rubin hardware and the first dedicated capacity tranches is expected to begin in early 2027, giving local planners and workforce developers roughly nine months before the buildout phase intensifies.