Nebius in 2026: a GPU cloud review for teams leaving AWS or Azure

Nebius is the AI cloud of Nebius Group N.V., a Dutch company whose shares trade on Nasdaq and which was called Yandex N.V. until August 2024. It is a GPU cloud first. A new account can start up to 32 H100 GPUs in Finland, or 32 B300s in France or the UK, after a USD 25 card charge and without a sales call, and the H100 costs USD 4.50 (EUR 4.01) an hour, 39% less than AWS's nearest H100 in Stockholm. Managed Slurm and Kubernetes come with it, and traffic out of VMs is free. The catch is in the terms: GPU prices rose twice in 2026, by about half in four months, on a few days' notice; regions are single sites with no availability zones documented; and the general-purpose catalogue is too thin to replace an AWS estate.

This article is one of a series comparing 24 European cloud providers with AWS and Azure; the overview puts them side by side. Everything below was checked on 15 and 16 October 2026 against Nebius's documentation, legal terms, price pages, status page and postmortems, its SEC filings and user reports, each at its source. We did not open an account or run workloads.

At a glance

What you can build

Nebius sells GPUs, the tools to train and serve models on them, and a small general-purpose layer. Status is general availability unless noted; preview services "come without guaranteed service levels".

Missing outright: bare metal, managed MySQL, Redis or Valkey, MongoDB, Kafka and OpenSearch, functions, queues and pub/sub, a standalone load balancer, a CDN, documented DDoS protection, a general backup service and availability zones. Object Storage has no Object Lock, replication rules or event notifications. Managed PostgreSQL is not offered in Madrid. Token Factory changes quickly: Nebius removed two batches of serverless model IDs, on 22 June and 31 August 2026, with no automatic rerouting.

The tooling covers a gRPC and REST API, SDKs for Go, Python and TypeScript, a CLI and a Terraform provider, still pre-1.0 (0.6.71, published 15 October 2026) and not found on the OpenTofu registry.

What it costs

Nebius list prices in US dollars, the only billing currency outside Israel, VAT excluded, checked 15 and 16 October 2026. Euros are at the ECB rate of 15 October (1 EUR = 1.1208 USD).

GPUs

GPU VMs are billed per second. On the H100, H200, B200, B300 and RTX PRO 6000 the GPU-hour price includes the preset's vCPUs and RAM (16 vCPUs and 200 GB per H100); disks are extra.

AWS sells no H100, H200 or B200 in Frankfurt. Its nearest H100 costs USD 7.36 (EUR 6.57) per GPU-hour in Stockholm, where the H200 is USD 8.47 and the B200 USD 17.91; its B300 is USD 27.19 in London. Azure charges USD 15.98 per GPU-hour on its 8-GPU InfiniBand H100 size, which it does not sell in Frankfurt, and USD 13.78 for the H200 in Frankfurt. Nebius's H100 costs 61% of AWS's Stockholm price and its B300 35% of AWS's London price. AWS starts every account at zero GPU quota.

A quota is not capacity. For on-demand and preemptible services the Services Agreement lets Nebius "refuse to provide the Services at its sole discretion based on available capacity, price, cluster utilization or other operational considerations".

Preemptible and committed. Since 8 October 2026 spot prices move: "from" USD 0.99 per GPU-hour on B300 and B200 and USD 0.79 on H200, H100 and RTX PRO 6000, changing "as often as every 15 minutes", up to "one cent below the current pay-as-you-go (PAYG) on-demand rate". Commitments promise "up to 35% less than on-demand rates" for multi-month cluster reservations, for companies only, through sales, with no public price list. Rack-scale systems are sold that way too, and their fee covers the whole rack, including a "Maintenance Buffer" of 2 of its 18 nodes.

Price changes. On-demand GPU prices rose on 1 June and again on 1 October 2026, in USD per GPU-hour:

The October step is in the current pricing documentation; the earlier prices come from archived copies of Nebius's pages. On 1 October CPU-only VMs rose too: the Genoa vCPU by 25% and RAM by 41%. An archived copy of the documentation still showed the H100 at 3.85 with no notice on 26 September 2026; the copy of 29 September announced the change. The contract requires notice "at least three (3) calendar days prior to any increase in Service Rates"; we found no record of earlier notice.

Workload A

A starter setup: one VM with 2 vCPU and 4 GB, a 40 GB disk, one IPv4 address, 1 TB of egress and 100 GB of object storage, in eu-west1 (France), the nearest region to Frankfurt with every line item.

AWS charges EUR 112.37 and Azure EUR 116.15 for the same in Frankfurt, so Nebius costs 42% of AWS and 40% of Azure. In Finland a new account's quota for CPU-only vCPUs is 0, so this VM would first need a request there.

Workload B

A small production system: three VMs of 4 vCPU and 16 GB with an IPv4 address each, 300 GB of SSD block storage, a load balancer, PostgreSQL with 2 vCPU, 8 GB and 100 GB as primary plus standby, 1 TB of object storage with 1 million PUT and 10 million GET requests, a Kubernetes control plane and 2 TB of egress.

AWS charges EUR 1,082.61 for workload B on m7i.xlarge and Azure EUR 1,091.88 on D4s_v5, so Nebius costs 45% of either. AWS bills the 2 TB of egress at USD 171.00, its HA database at USD 320.13 with storage and the EKS control plane at USD 73.00; Nebius charges nothing, USD 217.62 and nothing.

Three caveats. The PostgreSQL SLA covers only clusters "consisting of three or more DB Hosts"; with three hosts the total is USD 655.24 (EUR 584.62), 54% of AWS. The docs do not say whether the database is priced per host or per cluster; we assumed per host. And the load balancer exists only inside Managed Kubernetes, so the three VMs would have to become Kubernetes nodes to sit behind one.

Egress, IPv4 and billing

The pricing page lists "Egress/Ingress traffic: Free" and "Public IP address: Free", with no fair-use clause, though the Compute terms keep the right to charge outgoing traffic "separately". Object Storage is the exception: the Standard class costs USD 0.015 per GiB to the internet or another region, the Enhanced Throughput class nothing, and the Intelligent class nothing up to three times the average volume stored. AWS charges USD 0.09 per GB beyond its free 100 GB.

Card payers are charged at the start of each month and whenever spending reaches a "billing threshold". There is no free tier; startup credits come only through Nebius's VC partners, for startups that have raised USD 5M or more. Budgets send alerts, but "A budget does not stop or cap your usage".

Reliability

What a region is. The documentation and the SLA speak only of regions; we found no zone concept and no cross-zone failover, though also no sentence saying zones do not exist. Nebius owns one site, in Mäntsälä, Finland (eu-north1). The 20-F lists the French, UK, Icelandic, Israeli and US sites as colocation, with the operators unnamed; the model for Madrid is not stated. The SOC 3 audit excluded the colocation providers' controls.

The database standby. The documentation does not say where the PostgreSQL standby sits, whether replication is synchronous, or how long failover takes. AWS and Azure put a synchronous standby in another zone and fail over in 60 to 120 seconds.

The SLAs. The general SLA took effect on 28 September 2026; like every Nebius legal document, it is dated and its earlier versions are archived.

• A GPU VM counts as down when a GPU fails or NVLink or the InfiniBand fabric is lost, not for slowdowns or reduced bandwidth "that does not result in loss of connectivity". Downtime ends when Nebius says the VM can be restarted on another host.
• You claim through the console within 14 calendar days after the month ends, "otherwise such claim shall be deemed waived". Credits go against future payments and are the "sole and exclusive remedy". Planned node maintenance up to 8 hours a month and "a request of authorized governmental authorities" are excluded.
• Credits are a share of the "Service Fee", and the Kubernetes control plane and public IPs are free. Our reading, which the documents do not settle: those SLAs may pay nothing.

AWS commits to 99.99% for instances across two or more zones and 99.5% for a single instance, with credits up to 100% and claims until the end of the second billing cycle; Azure allows 60 days. Nebius's best is AWS's single-instance level, with the shortest claim window of the three.

Status page and incidents. status.nebius.com groups components by region, with history back to November 2024: 201 entries to 15 October 2026, 11 of them critical and 94 major. Nebius has published seven detailed postmortems since November 2024.

In every postmortem the fault stayed in one region; the global console and API outages of 2025 and the six-region entry of July 2026 are the exceptions. The August postmortem shows who comes first: "All reserved GPU capacity was confirmed restored by 08:38 UTC on August 20; restoration of the remaining on-demand node pool continued for several more days." Sign-in through Google, GitHub and Microsoft, the only way to log in, failed in June and December 2025.

Support

Every account gets free technical support through console tickets. First non-automated response: critical 30 minutes, high 60 minutes, medium 4 hours, low one business day on "the Netherlands calendar". These are response targets, not resolution times, and hours of coverage and languages are not stated. No paid tier is published; the SOC 3 report mentions a dedicated technical account manager, with no public terms.

AWS's free Basic plan opens no technical cases, and 30 minutes for a business-critical outage costs the greater of USD 29 a month or 9% of spend on Business Support+. Azure's one-hour target starts at USD 100 a month. No user-report theme on Nebius support met our evidence bar.

Getting an account

You sign in with a Google, GitHub or Microsoft account and bill as a company (with tax or VAT ID) or as an individual. Adding a card charges USD 25, credited to the balance, and activation is "Automatic after adding a card and paying the initial $25". No identity document step is described, but the contract lets Nebius ask for documents and suspend access if they do not arrive within 5 calendar days.

Beside the GPU quotas above, each region allows 12 regular and 8 preemptible VMs and 5 GPU clusters. Four 8-GPU H100 or H200 nodes in Finland, or four B300 nodes in France or the UK, fit the default on day one; B200 always needs a request. Workload B in eu-west1 needs one request too: the defaults there are 200 non-GPU vCPUs, 2 TiB of Network SSD, 2 Kubernetes clusters, 10 PostgreSQL clusters and 3 public IPv4 addresses, so a load balancer IP beside three public VMs needs a fourth.

Nebius may suspend access for an AUP breach, late payment, suspected fraud or a legal request, and also "if Nebius has a reasonable doubt" that one applies; data is kept 60 days after a suspension. It can end the contract "without cause (for convenience) at any time, upon a thirty (30) days prior written notice"; the customer can leave on 10 days' notice.

Compliance and data protection

The Data Processing Agreement of 15 September 2026 says customer content "is hosted and processed in the region selected by Customer, subject to any limited Processing outside that region necessary for the operation, maintenance, security or support". New sub-processors are announced 15 days ahead, with a right to object. Group companies that may do engineering and support sit in the US, the Netherlands, Israel, Finland, the UK, the Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, France and Serbia, the last under standard contractual clauses. Madrid is not among the processing locations the list gives for Nebius B.V.

A European customer contracts with Nebius B.V. under Dutch law, before the courts of Amsterdam, and is invoiced in USD.

Who controls it

Nebius Group N.V. is "a Dutch public company with limited liability", registered at Schiphol, with offices in Amsterdam and its Class A shares on Nasdaq (NBIS). It has about 1,500 employees, with R&D in Europe, North America and Israel, and most of its customers are in the US.

Votes. Class A shares carry one vote, Class B shares ten. On 31 March 2026 Highvern Cayman Limited, as trustee of the LASTAR Trust, "the beneficiaries of which include Mr. Volozh or members of his family", held 85.56% of the Class B shares: 51.62% of the votes for about 11% of the equity. Nebius is therefore a Nasdaq "Controlled Company" and uses the exemption for its nominating and corporate governance committee, which Arkady Volozh chairs. Volozh, the principal founder, has been CEO since August 2024, and was CEO of the company, then Yandex, from 2000 to 2022. Vladimir Ivanov holds 7.15% of the votes; the 20-F does not say who he is. NVIDIA, the sole GPU supplier, reports 9.3% of the Class A shares as a passive holder, mostly through a warrant bought for about USD 2 billion. By our arithmetic, the trust's Class B holding would have been 50.01% of the votes at the AGM record date in August 2026; no later ownership table has been published.

The separation from Yandex, as the filings state it. On 5 February 2024 the company agreed to sell "all of the Group's businesses in Russia and related businesses in certain international markets", more than 95% of its revenue, assets and employees. The sale closed on 17 May and 12 July 2024, for USD 2.6 billion in cash plus Class A shares returned. The 20-F says: "After the Divestment, the Company does not have any continuing involvement in the divested businesses", and "We do not have any customers, suppliers or business partners in Russia, own or hold any interest in any businesses or legal entities in Russia, or derive any revenues from Russia". The company took its current name in August 2024.

Large customers, as the filings state them. Under a contract effective 7 September 2025, Nebius provides Microsoft with dedicated GPU capacity at Nebius's Vineland, New Jersey data centre for five years, "up to about $17.4 billion through 2031". Meta signed for about USD 2.9 billion of dedicated GPU clusters in November 2025, and in March 2026 for up to about USD 27 billion more: USD 12 billion of dedicated clusters, plus up to USD 15 billion under which Meta must buy "any unsold capacity in respect of certain GPU clusters" that Nebius does not sell to others. The second-quarter letter of 2026 says: "We could sell our entire 2027 capacity on these terms today."

The cloud platform and the server and rack designs are Nebius's own.

Leaving

VM egress is free, so moving disks, databases and cluster data out costs nothing per gigabyte. Exporting 10 TiB from Object Storage Standard costs USD 153.60, unless you copy it through a VM in the same region, which is free; whether Nebius regards that as within its terms is not stated. A data portability page, written for the EU Data Act and the GDPR, lists the export path for each service.

Most of the stack is standard: Kubernetes, PostgreSQL 16, Soperator, S3. Lock-in sits in the Kubernetes annotations for load balancers, in Token Factory model IDs that disappear on deprecation dates, and in commitments, which are prepaid, can be shortened "only ... if allowed by the terms of your addendum", and are extended only "subject to the available capacity". Deleted objects are "physically deleted ... within 4 days".

What users report

First-hand reports are thin. Most Hacker News comments mentioning Nebius since October 2024 are about the stock, funding or jobs; Reddit gave few usable threads, and review sites do not count as evidence here.

GPUs without a sales call. Users contrast "the neo-clouds", Nebius among them, with AWS, where "you can't ever get an 80gb gpu without a long term reserve" (44182548, June 2025), and report renting spot RTX PRO 6000 VMs for "the large memory and pricing" (49956984, October 2026) and running H200 VMs (47960926, April 2026). These are short mentions.

Scarce capacity on the newest GPUs. One user asks what it means when "the Nebius capacity dashboard says they have around 3 non-preemptible B200s available" (48876544, July 2026). It is a single report, but Nebius's own documents point the same way: a B200 quota of zero, the right to refuse on-demand service, the Meta clause and the August restoration order.

The Yandex origin. It comes up whenever Nebius is discussed, as opinion rather than service experience (49003889, 46057759, 49004060, 48879482, November 2025 to July 2026). The filings' account is above.

Inference quality. In August 2025 a self-identified Nebius employee posted on Reddit that its GPT-OSS deployment had scored poorly on Artificial Analysis's accuracy benchmarks because the reasoning effort setting was not being passed through, and that it had been fixed and the benchmark re-run (Reddit). Simon Willison's write-up of the same benchmark shows how far open models can differ by provider.

An analyst view, not a user report: SemiAnalysis moved Nebius to its top "Platinum" tier in September 2026, while noting "sizable prepayments that reach 100% on 1 year commits". Nebius lists SemiAnalysis in its partner catalogue, and SemiAnalysis sells assessments to clouds.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

Nebius suits machine learning teams that need H100, H200 or B300 GPUs now, in Europe, without a sales cycle; teams that train with Slurm or Kubernetes and checkpoint their jobs; startups serving open models through Token Factory or their own endpoints; and buyers who want a Dutch contracting entity for GPU work and can live with single-site regions.

Look elsewhere if you are moving a general web or SaaS estate off AWS or Azure, since the managed services are not there; if you need failover across zones inside a region; if you need B200 or GB200-class capacity on demand, or GPU prices that hold without a commitment; or if you need BSI C5, SecNumCloud or HDS. If founder control or the Yandex history is a gating question for your procurement, read the filings before deciding.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• Prices and Compute pricing, with archived copies of both on the Wayback Machine
• Object Storage pricing, VPC pricing, Kubernetes pricing
• Pay-as-you-go, commitments, billing threshold, budgets
• Startups
• AWS and Azure figures: AWS Price List bulk API and Azure Retail Prices API, converted at the ECB rate of 15 October 2026

Terms and SLA

• Services Agreement, published 15 September 2026, effective 28 September 2026
• SLA and service levels
• Compute specific terms
• Data Processing Agreement and sub-processors, 15 September 2026

Documentation

• Regions and services
• VM types and preemptible VMs
• Compute quotas and quotas overview
• Managed PostgreSQL
• Sign-up and payer types
• Support
• Data portability and data deletion
• Token Factory
• Q3 2026 release notes
• Terraform provider and CNCF conformance, v1.36

Status and incidents

• Status page
• Postmortems: 26 November 2024, 27 January 2025, 13 March 2025, 5 May 2025, 26 February 2026, 10 March 2026, 19 August 2026

Compliance

• Trust center
• ISO 27001 certificate
• SOC 3 report, April to July 2025

Company and ownership

• Form 20-F for 2025, filed 30 April 2026
• Second quarter 2026 results and shareholder letter, 12 August 2026
• AGM notice, 27 July 2026, and AGM results, 26 August 2026
• NVIDIA Schedule 13G, filed 20 July 2026

User reports and analysts

• Hacker News: 44182548, 46057759, 47960926, 48876544, 48879482, 49003889, 49004060, 49956984
• Reddit, r/LocalLLaMA: GPT-OSS quality on Nebius, fixed, 19 August 2025
• Simon Willison, 15 August 2025
• SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX 3.0, 23 September 2026