Nebius raises $775M in its first secured debt — GPUs as collateral, no dilution

Nebius closed a $775M senior secured loan — the company's first secured debt financing — collateralized by GPU hardware already running in its data centers and the cash flows of an existing customer contract. The structure funds buildout without issuing new shares, and Nebius pointed to more than $40B of additional contracted revenue from investment-grade customers, including Microsoft and Meta, as the base for repeating it.

Why it matters

The neocloud sector's funding model is shifting from equity to asset-backed credit, and lenders are now treating deployed GPUs plus hyperscaler contracts as bankable collateral — CoreWeave's $8.5B facility earlier this year was the first investment-grade-rated GPU-backed financing, and Nebius is now the template's second proof. For a stock that had been sold down on dilution fears, replacing share issuance with secured debt changes the per-share math directly. The open question is the one skeptics of GPU-boom "circular financing" keep raising: collateral that depreciates on a chip cycle, lent against contracts with a handful of the same hyperscalers everyone else is lending against.

What to watch

The terms Nebius gets on the next tranche (its stated intent), utilization and renewal on the pledged customer contract, and whether rating agencies extend investment-grade treatment down the neocloud tier.