BNP analyzes the AI computing power giants: CoreWeave (CRWV.US) leads by far in production capacity, while Nebius (NBIS.US) is considered promising in the long term but neutral in the short term.

French bank BNP Paribas recently expressed its views on the industry debate between computing power supply and long-term sustainability, with artificial intelligence cloud computing service providers CoreWeave (CRWV.US) and Nebius (NBIS.US) once again becoming the focus of the market. BNP analyst Stefan Slowinski stated in a research report to clients, "In the short term, we believe that the pricing environment is still favorable, as evidenced by recent artificial intelligence infrastructure agreements reached by SpaceX (SPCX.US) with Anthropic and Alphabet Inc. Class C." Slowinski said, "We estimate that these agreements can generate $30-50 billion in revenue per gigawatt (GW) of computing power (the specific contribution of the $6 billion transaction with Reflection AI in terms of revenue per GW is still unclear)." Although we believe that SpaceX's pricing ability is partly due to its ability to provide short-term computing power to two customers who are relatively insensitive to pricing, we still view these transactions as a positive signal for the pricing environment." In further analysis, Slowinski believes that concerns about the shift from so-called "extreme consumption" to Token optimization strategies may actually be beneficial for Nebius, as the current demand for computing power still "far exceeds supply." (He pointed out that Amazon.com, Inc.'s cloud service (AWS) recently raised GPU reserved service prices by 20%.) Slowinski added, "In this context, Nebius's performance is relatively impressive, as its AI cloud technology stack seems more capable of supporting enterprise customers in fine-tuning open-source models, thereby providing a cost-effective alternative for companies seeking cutting-edge model and lab pricing solutions. This adds a new dimension to the long-term investment narrative for Nebius (although this logic has not yet been reflected in financial reports)." Regarding the larger scale of the "new cloud" sector, Slowinski stated that compared to large-scale cloud service providers, new cloud providers can accept lower unleveraged return rates as their monetization is still in the early stages, and financial leverage can bring attractive project-level internal rate of return (IRR). Regarding the situation where CoreWeave's stock performance lags behind Nebius, Slowinski believes that there is a "catch-up opportunity" as operational improvements continue in the second half of 2026. He explained, "The company is significantly increasing its computing capacity, which to some extent masks the unit economics of the business; at the same time, new contract pricing has been fully considered to offset component inflation while maintaining a contribution profit margin of over 20%." Furthermore, compared to its peers in the new cloud sector, CoreWeave has made more progress in capacity building (with an active electricity capacity of around 1 GW, while Nebius is around 200 MW), and as the proportion of new deployments to existing installed base declines gradually, profit margin fluctuations are expected to stabilize. In a favorable pricing environment, effective use of asset-backed leverage, and overall decrease in capital costs, we still find the risk-return ratio at the current level attractive." Slowinski still holds a "positive view" of Nebius's long-term fundamentals, but given the significant rise in the stock price this year, he has given it a "neutral" rating.