Meta Signs $27 Billion AI Infrastructure Agreement With Nebius

Meta has formed a $27 billion infrastructure agreement with AI cloud company Nebius.

Under the agreement, Nebius will — starting early next year — provide $12 billion of dedicated capacity across multiple locations, the companies announced Monday (March 16).

According to the announcement, the effort will involve “one of the first large-scale deployments of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform.” In connection with access to these deployments, Meta has agreed to purchase additional compute capacity for up to $15 billion over a five-year period.

“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,” Nebius founder and CEO Arkady Volozh said in the announcement. “We will continue to deliver.”

Based in Amsterdam, Nebius rebranded from Russian internet company Yandex. After selling the search engine of that business, it shifted its focus to cloud-computing services for artificial intelligence (AI) operations.

Last month, the company announced plans to acquire agentic search provider Tavily, in a deal aimed at combining real-time search infrastructure with Nebius’s AI platform amid rising enterprise adoption of agentic AI.

This latest deal is the latest example of Meta’s aggressive spending on AI projects, with the tech giant moving to purchase oChinese startup Manus and, more recently, Moltbook, a social networking platform for artificial intelligence agents.

Aside from its acquisitions, Meta has also been building out its AI talent pool, offering multi-million dollar compensation packages to experts in the field.

The company also plans to spend between $115 billion and $135 billion this year as it races to construct “data centers, chips and infrastructure capable of supporting increasingly powerful AI models,” as PYMNTS wrote last week.

This is a level of spending that places Meta in the same neighborhood as some of the biggest investors in AI infrastructure, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

“The difference is that those companies operate cloud businesses that directly monetize the computing power they build,” the report added. “Training models for internal use is only one part of the equation. The same infrastructure can also be rented to thousands of enterprise customers. Meta does not have that outlet.”

Last week saw a report by Reuters that Meta is planning its largest round of layoffs in years, with cuts affecting at least 20% of the company, as it looks to offset its AI spending. A spokesperson for the company dismissed the Reuters report.

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