AI infrastructure company Nebius Group NV has entered into a $17.4 billion deal to provide dedicated compute power to Microsoft from a new data center in Vineland, New Jersey. The five-year agreement could be worth up to $19.4 billion with additional capacity and services. The news sent Nebius shares surging by 49 percent on the Nasdaq composite, underscoring how the rapidly growing demand for AI support can influence the fate of companies. The deal added $1 billion to the value of Nebius founder Arkady Volozh’s stake. The Russian expatriate founded that country’s equivalent of Google.

“The services will be deployed in several tranches this year and next,” reports The Wall Street Journal, which says the deal will allow the Amsterdam-based Nebius “to grow its AI cloud business more aggressively in 2026.” Nebius describes itself as a full-stack AI infrastructure company with a footprint across Europe, North America and Israel.

The Vineland facility, described by NJ.com in late July as “nearing completion,” marks the first U.S. plant constructed by Nebius, which owns a cloud computing data center in Finland and operates co-located GPU clusters at third-party data centers, including one in Kansas City, Missouri.

In a newsroom post, Volozh said the Microsoft deal is the first of what he expects will be several “significant long-term contracts with leading AI labs and big tech companies” for Nebius, which provides core AI cloud services to customers “from AI startups to enterprises.”

TechRepublic writes that “Nebius counts Nvidia and Accel among its major backers, giving the company both industry credibility and financial support.”

In January, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post the company was “on track to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled data centers” globally for fiscal 2025. Despite that, CFO Amy Hood “told investors in July that the company expected ‘to remain capacity constrained’ through the end of this calendar year,” per TechRepublic.

Nebius joins CoreWeave, Oracle and Equinix as external partners Microsoft has tapped to meet demand. Financial Times reported in March that Microsoft’s $10 billion contract with CoreWeave, a former cryptocurrency firm, was being scaled back “over delivery issues and missed deadlines.”