Nebius has increased a planned debt raise from $4.5 billion to $5 billion as it pushes ahead with an AI infrastructure expansion programme that could cost as much as $25 billion this year.

The scale of the new borrowing is close to what the company spent on infrastructure in the second quarter alone. Nebius recorded approximately $5.7 billion of capital expenditure during the three months to June, primarily on GPUs, related hardware and data centre expansion.

That spending forms part of a 2026 capital expenditure programme of between $20 billion and $25 billion, which Nebius reaffirmed in its second-quarter results earlier this month.

The company ended June with $8.04 billion in cash and cash equivalents, but is drawing on several other sources of capital to fund its expansion.

It says it now has more than $40 billion of customer commitments and expects to receive more than $9 billion in upfront payments from customers during 2026.

It has also begun borrowing against infrastructure and customer contracts. In July, Nebius secured a separate $775 million loan backed by GPUs already in operation and cash flows from an agreement with an investment-grade customer.

The latest $5 billion raise adds another source of funding as Nebius builds out the data centre and power capacity needed to fulfil those customer commitments.

It is now targeting 5 GW of contracted power by the end of 2026, up from more than 4 GW previously. That figure represents power secured through contracted land and power commitments rather than capacity that will all be operational by the end of the year. In fact, the company specifically committed to deploying more than 1 GW of capacity a year from 2027.

The UK is one of the markets where that wider expansion is beginning to take shape. Nebius has agreed to deploy high-density AI infrastructure at Vantage Data Centers’ Newport campus, becoming the first announced commercial capacity commitment in the South Wales AI Growth Zone.

The company has also committed approximately £1.7 billion to capacity across four UK deployments, which are expected to provide a combined 65 MW when fully ramped in 2027.

Its first UK deployment using NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs went live in November 2025. That infrastructure has also been used in a National Grid and Emerald AI trial testing whether AI computing workloads can reduce electricity demand in response to grid conditions without interrupting customer workloads.